Rem Koolhaas warns Brexit could plunge UK into 'bad old days'

Rem Koolhaas warned a vote for Brexit could thrust Britain back to an era typified by waitresses in Victorian bonnets at the Architectural Association restaurant.

In an interview with the BBC about the referendum, the OMA founder said “so much more is at stake than simply in or out”.

“We shouldn’t exaggerate the effect. But if you look at the arguments to leave you can see this is a movement of people who want to fundamentally change England back into the way it supposedly was before.”

Koolhaas first came to London shortly before Britain joined the EU in 1973, to study at the AA.

While the city was “unbelievably hip” in some ways – with Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and the Beatles – it was also a very archaic “world of pea soup and a complete absence of coffee”.

The waitresses in the AA restaurant wore Victorian uniforms with white bonnets, he said.

He returned to the AA eight years later – after the UK’s accession – and found both the school and the country “completely transformed”.

The AA was staffed by people from Germany, Czechoslovakia and France which had helped “modernise the English mentality, the whole of English civilisation”, he said.

The nation had “found a way of being continental and English”, he added.

He went on to say that many of the things the Dutch blamed on Brussels bureaucracy were in fact decisions made by home-grown politicians.

“The main issue of Europe is communication,” he said. “It’s the prime ministers and governments who make the decisions but because of the Brussels myth they can also blame Brussels for decisions they took themselves.”

Koolhaas was speaking on Wednesday night, after a Dutch newspaper published a love letter to the UK likening leaving the EU to “tea without milk” and urging the British: “Don’t leave me this way.”

In May Koolhaas told BD “of course” the UK should vote to remain in the EU, adding that “the whole idea to question it is really crazy”.