Those of us who imagined that the perfect lives in The Truman Show constituted a glimpse of the future could have no better reality check than The Near and the Elsewhere, a potent exhibition of visual artworks at the PM Gallery at Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing, London. These unsettling freeze-frames – by turns surreal, mysterious, or coruscatingly depressing – are like slides from some urban-cum-architectural pathology lab.

Edinburgh's 122-year-old institution has had a 21st-century renovation

Richard Serra reveals the inspiration behind his 80ft landmark to Jay Merrick

Damien Hirst's famous 1992 shark, aka The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, came second. Six years earlier, the 25ft-long fibreglass Headington Shark was jammed into the roof of a small suburban terraced house in Headington High Street, Oxford. A Hirstian title for it might be, The Possibility of How Very Dare They in the Shires.

A nondescript Cardiff building is reborn as virtuoso modernism

The Marlowe Theatre is certainly a scene stealer, says Jay Merrick, in a city that's already full of star attractions

London's skyline has already undergone dramatic change. But two developments are accelerating the transformation from historic capital to modern metropolis. Jay Merrick reports

Scandal in the Seventies put the kibosh on plans to turn Newcastle into the Brasilia of the North. Now Jay Merrick discovers a new sense of adventure on the unfashionable bank of the Tyne

Sam Aloof is a designer whose obsessions are raw materials - paper, cardboard, leather - and perfection.

Philip Bintliff turns practical solutions into visual triumphs, and he is often often inspired by pop music.