It's been a good year for ranting  for declaiming and excoriating, that is, of a witty, perceptive and entertaining kind. Thus we have Jonathan Meades's collection of essays and screenplays, Museum Without Walls (Unbound £18.99), in which the author waxes both lyrical and bilious on subjects including Sir Edwin Lutyens, Buenos Aires, train stations, the dismal works of Blairite regeneration and the Third Reich. Don't expect systematic theory, or an absence of repetition, but do expect love and loathing expressed in prose close to the 400-nanometer end of the colour spectrum, but precise and exhilarating nonetheless. Never knowingly under-adjectived, not shy of neologisms, Meades offers up phrases such as the following, in which he accuses contemporary architects of "feeding on the avant-garde of many decades ago, merely saucing the dish with sustainastic, sustainabulous splashes of green piety and chromatic discord".

Meades has antecedents in Southampton, the city which also nurtured (if that is the word) Owen Hatherley. They are a few decades apart in age, but kindred sprits, in their combination of fascination with overlooked places and their eloquent fury. Something in the Sotonian air that breeds them, evidently. This year, Hatherley published A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain (Verso £20), a rapidly produced follow-up to his A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. As in the earlier book, the new one takes you on a tour of places  Preston, Leicester, Cumbernauld  whose touching fragments of dignity are under relentless assault from the same Blairite junk that Meades hates.

Hatherley rampages around the country a little as Nikolaus Pevsner once did for his Buildings of England series, but instead of seeking out delightful early English churches and Palladian houses, he describes the most repulsive Novotels and buy-to-let apartment blocks he can find. Imagine a restaurant guide concerned mostly with purveyors of microwaved spaghetti bolognaise and you get the picture.

Other angry books include David Harvey's Rebel Cities (Verso £12.99), a Marxist dissection of the way forces of capital shape the places where we live. It's not something to be tackled after an over-liquid Christmas dinner, as the prose is hard work. It also ends with a statement of belief in the power of the Occupy movement to change the world, which is already looking optimistic. But this book has the merit of being right quite a lot of the time and provocative for much of the rest of it.

The Future of Architecture. Since 1889. (Phaidon £45) is, with its clever-clever full stops and all, an irritating title for a good book. Written by the French historian Jean-Louis Cohen, it is a survey of architecture over the last century and a bit, which seeks to uncover the full richness of invention and experiments over this period, in multiple locations. This is in conscious opposition to previous Eurocentric histories of the period, which tended to focus on the works of a few great masters and their apparent convergence to create something called modern architecture. If there were prizes for picture sourcing, this would win it, with its abundant documentation of wide-eyed young revolutionaries, little-known schools and villas and forgotten visions.

If you want to know still more about the architecture of the last century, however, go to Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (University of Chicago $45) by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst. This a magisterial update of a magisterial biography of a magisterial figure, a work that gives due credit to the force of its subject's architecture, while also pulling no punches on subjects such as his treatment of the women in his life and his willingness to talk  a little more than was decent  to the Nazis.

Otherwise, if you want to soothe yourself after the ranting with delightful and evocative images, try Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography (Princeton Architectural £25) by John Comazzi, a collection of mostly black-and-white photographs of mid-century American modernism  the austere luxury of Mies van der Rohe, the curves of Eero Saarinen  which capture a confident faith in the future, but also a subtle melancholia. Or else London: Hidden Interiors (Transatlantic £40), an English Heritage production assembled by Philip Davies, which includes art deco ballrooms and the gallows at Wandsworth prison, as well as quite a lot of oak and walnut panelling.

Finally, two versions of the domestic. Edwin Heathcote's The Meaning of Home (Frances Lincoln £12.99) uses an engaging range of sources (Alfred Hitchcock, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Cabbala) to explore the significance of such things as stairs, roofs and swimming pools. Then there is Will Wiles's Care of Wooden Floors (Harper £12.99), a novel about minimalism and chaos, which reveals more about the interaction of architecture and life than many an earnest treatise. If you want above all a good read, get this one.

Britain, it is sometimes said, has a literary culture and not a visual or a spatial one. We give precedence to argument and story, wordplay and simile, and to the linear sequences of writing. Assuming, that is, that we aspire to anything of cultural merit whatsoever, which, as Jonathan Meades likes to point out, cannot be taken for granted.

Meades is a walking personification of the encounter of words and buildings. He is literate, conjuring Borges, Nabokov or Ezra Pound. He dazzles with words. He parades with prose. He piles up images and associations into teetering constructions, and then moves deftly on before we can see if they collapse. His writing can take us into the mind of a buzzard and out again, without apparent effort. When he wants to kill with words, he can swivel and stab in an instant.

He loves buildings and, more than buildings, places  "the greatest of free shows", as he calls them. His promiscuous appetite takes in almost anything  Belgian suburbs, brutalist masterpieces, Bremen, the terrains vagues that were obliterated by the London Olympic endeavour. He favours extravagance, extremity, eccentricity, anything but the bland. He then applies to these places an unashamedly personal view. The idea is not just to describe actual places, but to invent, to create out of observed reality imagined realms that did not previously exist.

This puts him in a certain tradition  Wordsworth on Westminster bridge, the ability of John Ruskin to make barely sane obsessions into glittering edifices of words, the poet and architectural guru John Betjeman. One of his heroes is the playwright-turned-architect John Vanbrugh, and perhaps most of all Ian Nairn, the excoriator of urban mediocrity who refused to ally himself with any architectural camp and who, perhaps under the strain of being both lonely and right, drank himself to death.

Like Nairn, Meades is a wandering eye attached to a skilful mouth, relieved of any duty to be a team player. This gives him the freedom to see through the Panglossian burble associated with (for example) regeneration projects. As he likes to say, architects themselves rarely have much verbal proficiency, and he likes to mock the tortured prose of their self-explanations, or mystifications. Often, for him, architects are the problem, being sheep-like followers of fashion who lack understanding for the places into which they insert their buildings. Then again he is surprisingly sympathetic to Zaha Hadid. "To compare her work to something already existing would be to detract from it," says Meades. As multiple comparison is one of his favourite techniques, he is effectively saying that her architectural imagination is beyond his literary compass.

Museum Without Walls is a compilation of essays, articles and screenplays. It therefore has moments of repetition, and lacks consistency or an overall argument. Not that it would have these things if it had been written as a single work: Meades makes clear his contempt for too much theorising, and consistency is one of the things from which he has freed himself. As somebody said of Nietzsche (and I doubt if Meades would object to this grandiose comparison), the lack of system is a sign of generosity of mind.

There can indeed be problems with an over-literary approach to built space. A place is not in the end a text, and words can kill architectural thought before it has a chance to flourish. As Meades points out, Nairn's capacious imagination was appropriated by the scribes of a narrow-minded conservation movement, and made mean. But, really, you don't have to worry about such things when you read Meades. You should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Deep into this labyrinthine collection of English and foreign explorations, architectural polemics and other, highly entertaining provocations, Jonathan Meades arrives on the coast of north Kent. He finds it "thrillingly cheerless": "marshes, mud  pylons, silos, hoppers, bulky mills, ships that tower over the earth, horizontal bands of smoke". In six quick pages, he surveys the area's unusual, ugly-beautiful intertwining of the industrial and pastoral, the historic and banal. Apart from a certain city swagger to the prose, and a slightly haughty tone to the historical material, the passage might be one of hundreds written in recent years by English authors examining their country's once-ignored "edgelands", as they are now fashionably known.

Except that Meades's piece was written 21 years ago. Over his three decades as an architecture critic, food writer, novelist, and author and presenter of strange, faintly hectoring television documentaries, he has often been ahead of the game. The revival of English restaurants; the power of postwar concrete buildings; the excesses of ever more individualistic and materialistic ordinary Britons  Meades's preoccupations have had the double-edged fate of becoming mainstream. As with Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, near-contemporaries and sometimes stylistic and thematic peers as well, you sometimes wonder what territory Meades has left to explore.

One solution may be to expand abroad. A few years ago he moved to France, and that country was the topic of his most recent TV series. Yet, as demonstrated by this loosely themed assortment of newspaper and magazine articles, TV scripts, and essays for museums and architectural publications  a rare such retrospective worth reading  Meades has long been a cosmopolitan. There is an urbane 1998 depiction of Buenos Aires, its endless grid of streets "magnificent in its dogged monotony, claustrophobic, incarcerating"; and a characteristically esoteric 2005 appreciation of the suburbs of Bremen in Germany: "grand  sinuous  bourgeois opulence".

References to northern Europe pop up in even the most involved lectures on Englishness here. Partly, Meades's refusal to wear his enormous knowledge lightly is a reaction against the "cretinocracy" he sees as dumbing down the media. Partly, his northern European fixation is a response to most of Britain's ongoing fascination with the Mediterranean, a century-old trend he considers an escapist delusion. And partly his instinct as a writer is to please himself. "It is surely more honest," he warns in the combative introduction, "to write for an audience of one."

Meades writes repeatedly that he loves northern Europe for its "civility". But his writing is compellingly uncivil. Of the late British architectural grandee James Stirling, designer of angular landmarks from the 1950s to the 90s, he says: "His buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases." Of the postmodern, highly commercial styles that Stirling and many of his peers adopted during the Reagan-Thatcher era, Meades is utterly contemptuous: "nursery colours", "toytown rustication", "a children's entertainer's garrulous importunacy".

The sentences and vocabulary in this book zigzag between the lordly and the thuggish, between high culture and low, between grand assertion and intricate description. A single, virtuoso, almost page-long sentence pans across the much-depicted landscape of the lower Lea Valley in east London before its sterilisation by the 2012 Olympics  as if to say: "I can do urban dereliction better than anyone else." As with Sinclair and Amis, the writing style constantly calls attention to itself; and in a sense, applying that style to anything and everything is the book's main undertaking.

Some readers will find the verbal and factual one-upmanship tiresome  I suspect an appetite for Meades is a bit of a boy thing  but there are also novel and important ideas here. A long, calmer, even melancholy 2012 essay on the last half-century of architecture in Britain and the wider world notes how, after an idealistic postwar interlude when social housing and other everyday public amenities were prestige projects, architecture has reverted to its traditional role of providing "show and swank" for the powerful. A pair of shorter, more cartoonish pieces from 2007 and 2008, just before the financial crisis, warn against "the curse of Bilbao", what Meades sees as the mistaken belief that ailing cities can be rescued by grafting on spectacular new cultural facilities. With cities all over Spain now close to bankruptcy despite acres of new trophy buildings, this scepticism seems prescient.

Other Meades dislikes listed here include most architects, the architectural press, rigid government planners, English suburbs, and the modern English countryside, "the free-for-all toxic playground that cities once were". What Meades likes, besides list-making at ostentatious length, emerges less readily from these bristling pages, but it includes urban mixing and improvisation, gentrification, and wider pavements  not so different a recipe for happier cities from that promoted until recently by New Labour and its city councils and urban taskforces. Meades frequently insists, regardless, that he loathes New Labour. Perversity is one of his vices and virtues.

England, specifically southern England, is his favourite love-hate object. A fragment of memoir is untypically lyrical about mushroom-picking as a boy on the downs near Salisbury: "Dawn would barely be breaking when we crossed the vaporous floated meadows " But another section is full of slowly acquired fury at the country pubs where his father lingered: "The stink of the gust of the bars  the intense jocularity  Beer is the enemy of food."

The climactic, most overtly emotional work here, though, is a posthumous profile of Ian Nairn, the angry, atmospheric British writer and broadcaster on cities and architecture who became a national figure in the 50s and 60s, and then slid into disappointed, beery passivity before he died in 1983. Meades calls Nairn "anarchic", "contrarian" and "a poet". He clearly regards him as a partial role model: "Why should a meditation on a city  not be a greater work of literature than a novel?"

But when it comes to Nairn's television, Meades goes on: "The programmes are clumsily shot like news reports, technically coarse, artless." There is only one poet of place whom Meades rates unreservedly. I hope he grumbles on for decades to come.

 Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

Deep into this labyrinthine collection of English and foreign explorations, architectural polemics and other, highly entertaining provocations, Jonathan Meades arrives on the coast of north Kent. He finds it "thrillingly cheerless": "marshes, mud  pylons, silos, hoppers, bulky mills, ships that tower over the earth, horizontal bands of smoke". In six quick pages, he surveys the area's unusual, ugly-beautiful intertwining of the industrial and pastoral, the historic and banal. Apart from a certain city swagger to the prose, and a slightly haughty tone to the historical material, the passage might be one of hundreds written in recent years by English authors examining their country's once-ignored "edgelands", as they are now fashionably known.

Except that Meades's piece was written 21 years ago. Over his three decades as an architecture critic, food writer, novelist, and author and presenter of strange, faintly hectoring television documentaries, he has often been ahead of the game. The revival of English restaurants; the power of postwar concrete buildings; the excesses of ever more individualistic and materialistic ordinary Britons  Meades's preoccupations have had the double-edged fate of becoming mainstream. As with Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, near-contemporaries and sometimes stylistic and thematic peers as well, you sometimes wonder what territory Meades has left to explore.

One solution may be to expand abroad. A few years ago he moved to France, and that country was the topic of his most recent TV series. Yet, as demonstrated by this loosely themed assortment of newspaper and magazine articles, TV scripts, and essays for museums and architectural publications  a rare such retrospective worth reading  Meades has long been a cosmopolitan. There is an urbane 1998 depiction of Buenos Aires, its endless grid of streets "magnificent in its dogged monotony, claustrophobic, incarcerating"; and a characteristically esoteric 2005 appreciation of the suburbs of Bremen in Germany: "grand  sinuous  bourgeois opulence".

References to northern Europe pop up in even the most involved lectures on Englishness here. Partly, Meades's refusal to wear his enormous knowledge lightly is a reaction against the "cretinocracy" he sees as dumbing down the media. Partly, his northern European fixation is a response to most of Britain's ongoing fascination with the Mediterranean, a century-old trend he considers an escapist delusion. And partly his instinct as a writer is to please himself. "It is surely more honest," he warns in the combative introduction, "to write for an audience of one."

Meades writes repeatedly that he loves northern Europe for its "civility". But his writing is compellingly uncivil. Of the late British architectural grandee James Stirling, designer of angular landmarks from the 1950s to the 90s, he says: "His buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases." Of the postmodern, highly commercial styles that Stirling and many of his peers adopted during the Reagan-Thatcher era, Meades is utterly contemptuous: "nursery colours", "toytown rustication", "a children's entertainer's garrulous importunacy".

The sentences and vocabulary in this book zigzag between the lordly and the thuggish, between high culture and low, between grand assertion and intricate description. A single, virtuoso, almost page-long sentence pans across the much-depicted landscape of the lower Lea Valley in east London before its sterilisation by the 2012 Olympics  as if to say: "I can do urban dereliction better than anyone else." As with Sinclair and Amis, the writing style constantly calls attention to itself; and in a sense, applying that style to anything and everything is the book's main undertaking.

Some readers will find the verbal and factual one-upmanship tiresome  I suspect an appetite for Meades is a bit of a boy thing  but there are also novel and important ideas here. A long, calmer, even melancholy 2012 essay on the last half-century of architecture in Britain and the wider world notes how, after an idealistic postwar interlude when social housing and other everyday public amenities were prestige projects, architecture has reverted to its traditional role of providing "show and swank" for the powerful. A pair of shorter, more cartoonish pieces from 2007 and 2008, just before the financial crisis, warn against "the curse of Bilbao", what Meades sees as the mistaken belief that ailing cities can be rescued by grafting on spectacular new cultural facilities. With cities all over Spain now close to bankruptcy despite acres of new trophy buildings, this scepticism seems prescient.

Other Meades dislikes listed here include most architects, the architectural press, rigid government planners, English suburbs, and the modern English countryside, "the free-for-all toxic playground that cities once were". What Meades likes, besides list-making at ostentatious length, emerges less readily from these bristling pages, but it includes urban mixing and improvisation, gentrification, and wider pavements  not so different a recipe for happier cities from that promoted until recently by New Labour and its city councils and urban taskforces. Meades frequently insists, regardless, that he loathes New Labour. Perversity is one of his vices and virtues.

England, specifically southern England, is his favourite love-hate object. A fragment of memoir is untypically lyrical about mushroom-picking as a boy on the downs near Salisbury: "Dawn would barely be breaking when we crossed the vaporous floated meadows " But another section is full of slowly acquired fury at the country pubs where his father lingered: "The stink of the gust of the bars  the intense jocularity  Beer is the enemy of food."

The climactic, most overtly emotional work here, though, is a posthumous profile of Ian Nairn, the angry, atmospheric British writer and broadcaster on cities and architecture who became a national figure in the 50s and 60s, and then slid into disappointed, beery passivity before he died in 1983. Meades calls Nairn "anarchic", "contrarian" and "a poet". He clearly regards him as a partial role model: "Why should a meditation on a city  not be a greater work of literature than a novel?"

But when it comes to Nairn's television, Meades goes on: "The programmes are clumsily shot like news reports, technically coarse, artless." There is only one poet of place whom Meades rates unreservedly. I hope he grumbles on for decades to come.

 Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.