Travis Elborough looks back on the life and work of the intrepid Ian Nairn, whose entertaining classic Modern Buildings in London has just been given a welcome reissue

The fearless architectural critic and broadcaster, Ian Nairn, briefly a familiar face on British television in the 1970s, succumbed to drink and despondency just ten days shy of his 53rd birthday, dying on 14 August 1983.

Forty years on, Notting Hill Editions have reissued the Nairn classic Modern Buildings in London. This brilliantly opinionated primer to the best of contemporary architecture in the capital was first published by London Transport back in 1964.

Given its original sponsor, it’s perhaps unsurprising to find much of LT’s then vast network represented within its contents, with Nairn full of praise for Stockwell’s concrete bus garage as “the noblest modern building in London”.

The book’s 260 entries range far out into the suburbs of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Kent, and even cover new towns such as Harlow in Essex (“it gets better as it goes on, and no final judgement is possible yet”) and Crawley in Sussex.

While some familiar modernist landmarks naturally feature – with a few, including the Royal Festival Hall, receiving a good dressing down – his choices are pleasingly eclectic. Who but Nairn could alight with infectious wonder on a motel attached to the Cock Inn in Epping Forest by the Hungarian architect Louis Erdi, or proclaim a simple white-brick ambulance station on Battersea Rise by some unknown hand at the London County Council as “someone’s real labour of love”. This praise is all the more notable, as elsewhere Nairn can be highly critical of the LCC, and especially its heavy-handed slum clearance work in the East End.

Unlike Nikolaus Pevsner – who he collaborated with on the Buildings of England series, completing the volume on his native Surrey and supplying entries for West Sussex – Nairn had no architectural training. He’d studied mathematics at the University of Birmingham before joining the RAF as a pilot.

It was as an aviator, flying over London, that he was tickled by the sight of the “concrete aeroplane” on the roof of Great Arthur House in the Golden Lane Estate, which he remarked was “frankly done for fun”, and by the then new terminal at Gatwick Airport (a “Swiss watch of a building”). The Bata shoe factory in East Tilbury, meanwhile, was to be recommended as a navigational aid to “the private pilot fumbling to find their way over the smog of the Thames Estuary”.

While still stationed in Norfolk, Nairn began contributing pieces on architecture to the Eastern Daily Press. Upon leaving the RAF, he eventually inveigled his way onto the staff of the Architectural Review after a concerted letter-writing campaign, and achieved almost instant notoriety at the age of 24 by authoring its special “Outrage” issue of June 1955. Billed by Nairn in the introduction as “a prophecy of doom,” the issue was a polemic against waves of recent development that, he argued, if left unchecked, would result in a Britain of “isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows” with “no real distinction between town and country”. He dubbed this phenomenon “subtopia” and foretold that it would not be long before “the end of Southampton” looked like “the beginning of Carlisle” and “the parts in between” like “the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton”.

The idea of subtopia ignited debate about Britain’s built environment. In the popular press of the day, Nairn was anointed as architecture’s answer to the Angry Young Men (though “Outrage” preceded John Osborne’s genre-spawning play, Look Back in Anger, by well over a year).

As a figure venting dissent to an emerging generation frustrated by the pace of change, Nairn would go on to inspire a fully fledged protest group. After attending his incendiary lecture at the Royal College of Art in 1958, a band of students, among them the Pop Art painter Pauline Boty, were roused to found Anti-Ugly Action. Its members expressed their disgust with buildings they considered reactionary or offensive by taking to the streets in flamboyant fashion. They marched, for instance, on the new Kensington Public Library, a neo-Georgian effort by E Vincent Harris, in 18th-century costume, accompanied by a Dixieland jazz combo.

Their impact was significant enough that both Nairn and the Anti-Uglies were cited favourably in the Labour Party’s (admittedly unsuccessful) 1959 election manifesto. What Nairn himself made of this, as rather more of a Tory anarchist with a distinctly anti-egghead and individualistic streak who claimed to be too unsophisticated to live in a Span house and distrusted Le Corbusier for his perceived contempt for ordinary people, I am not sure.

Perhaps to the detriment of his health but to the enormous benefit of his work as a critic, Nairn was to remain an utterly unclubbable outsider. Growing increasingly depressed by the poor quality of new buildings and the contemptuous attitudes of planners to the existing fabric of Britain’s towns and cities, Nairn was to issue an impassioned screed in the Observer, headlined “Stop the Architects Now”, just two years after Modern Buildings in London appeared.

London has obviously changed almost beyond recognition since then and the book is inevitably something of a ghost gazetteer to a city that no longer exists. Yet Nairn’s voice rings out loud and clear, and what he has to say about the interaction between human beings and places and so many individual architects and buildings remains as thought-provoking as ever.

The new edition of Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London, featuring an introduction by Travis Elborough, is available now, £15.99. Buy it here.

Travis Elborough’s books include The Long-Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World; Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles; and Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today, which won Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020. 

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