Ian Nairn

Ian Douglas Nairn (24 August 1930 – 14 August 1983) was a British architectural critic who coined the word ‘Subtopia’ to indicate drab suburbs that look identical through unimaginative town-planning. He published two strongly personalised critiques of London and Paris, and collaborated with Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered his reports to be too subjective, but acknowledged him as the better writer.

Early life

Ian Nairn was born at 4 Milton Road, Bedford, England. Nairn's father was a draughtsman on the R101 airship programme based at Shortstown. The family moved in 1932 when the airship programme was terminated, and Nairn was brought up in Surrey. It was the balancing-act nature of this essentially suburban environment which he stated "produced a deep hatred of characterless buildings and places". Nairn had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate (University of Birmingham) and a Royal Air Force pilot.

The Architectural Review and "Subtopia"

In 1955, Nairn established his reputation with a special issue of the Architectural Review called "Outrage" (later as a book in 1956), in which he coined the term "Subtopia" for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. The book was based around a nightmarish road trip that Nairn took from the south to the north of the country – the trip gave propulsion to his fears that we were heading for a drab new world where the whole of Britain would look like the fringes of a town, every view exactly the same. He also praised modernist urban developments such as the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, which eventually became one of the most unpopular buildings in the UK and was demolished in the early 21st century. "Outrage" was followed by "Counter-Attack Against Subtopia" in 1956 (published as a book in 1957). Both books were influential on Jane Jacobs, who was then working at Architectural Forum, the most widely read US architectural magazine. Jacobs cited "Outrage" and "Counter-Attack" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and she recommended Nairn to her contacts at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded Nairn's book The American Landscape: A Critical View (1965).

The Buildings of England

Nairn admired Nikolaus Pevsner's work (if not his methodology) on the then fledgling Buildings of England series, and had approached Pevsner in the early 1960s as a potential co-author. Pevsner, who wrote about "Visual Planning and the Picturesque", was influential on the formation of the Architectural Review's "Townscape" series of columns, which evolved into the movement to which Gordon Cullen and Nairn were key contributors. In common with several architectural writers and academics at the time, Nairn had already made small contributions to the series – in his case the volumes on Essex and Northumberland. Pevsner was initially reluctant, having thus far written the guidebooks alone. He was also aware of Nairn's views on the 'house style' of the series from reviews Nairn had written on earlier volumes. However the scale of the project began to demand assistance and Pevsner eventually handed almost all responsibility for writing the Surrey volume to Nairn, whose text ultimately constituted almost four-fifths of the finished volume.

Pevsner was content to give sole authorship to Nairn for the volume on Sussex, however as work progressed Nairn felt that his approach was increasingly at odds with the relative objectivity Pevsner required. Nairn began to feel that this was acting as a constraint on his writing, and ceased work on the Sussex volume before it was completed. Consequently, the guide was published with Nairn being given credit for the West Sussex section and Pevsner East Sussex.

In a review of the Sussex volume in the Listener on 15 July 1965, Alec Clifton-Taylor pointed out what he saw as the essential difference between Pevsner's and Nairn's contributions: "Dr. Pevsner... is inclined to tell us everything about a building except whether it is worth going to see. Mr Nairn, more subjective, occasionally perverse...never leaves us in any doubt about this aspect."

Later career

Nairn's style was more easily accommodated in his own architectural guidebooks, which he prefaced as being subjective and personal. Ultimately only two were ever published: Nairn's London (1966) and Nairn's Paris (1968). Planned guides to London's Countryside, The Industrial North, and Rome and Florence were announced but never appeared.

Nairn's writing style is concise, and often humorous, and he describes both his loves and hates, sometimes describing a passage between buildings rather than the buildings themselves, or a single detail, such as the elephant on the Albert Memorial that "has a backside just like a businessman scrambling under a restaurant table for his cheque-book". Despite their differences, Pevsner said of his style that "he writes better than I could ever hope to write".

In addition to his journalism, Nairn became for a time a familiar face on television, producing various series called for the BBC, starting with Nairn's North in 1967 and concluding with Nairn's Journeys in 1978.

He was fond of pubs and beer, and both his architectural guides and television journalism are full of descriptions of pubs, and recommendations of which beers to drink. He said in 1972 of a recently disused signal box in Longtown, Cumbria that he could imagine it being turned into a house, with the lever frames left in place and converted to beer pumps. This was part of his love of local and regional distinctiveness.

When he did the Yorkshire section of Nairn's Journeys, he, in his own words "bumped into" the great bluesman Champion Jack Dupree whilst doing a section of the programme in Halifax. The two got on rather well and maintained a close correspondence almost right up to his own death. In his concerns about the encroaching blandness of modern design, he was the heir of literary men who had similarly been critics of the spread of an Edwardian suburbia, such as E.M. Forster ("success was indistinguishable from failure" there), and John Betjeman ("red-brick rashes"), and which fed into the Campaign to Protect Rural England among others. This strain of thinking was, however, to become largely concerned with conservation of the heritage in affluent areas, rather than with Nairn's urban fringe. And like Betjeman, Nairn fought against the forces of subtopia, the obliteration of British heritage – though the forces of subtopia invariably prevailed; one example, his defence of Northampton's Emporium Arcade – 'if they do pull this place down it'll be a diabolical shame.' It was demolished June 1972.

He died on 14 August 1983, aged 52, from cirrhosis of the liver and chronic alcoholism. Consumed with a sense of failure, he sought refuge in drink and in his later years wrote almost nothing. He is buried in the Victorian Hanwell cemetery in west London. It is now in one of Ealing's conservation areas.

Influence

Writers and critics influenced by Nairn include J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Patrick Wright, Michael Bracewell, Jonathan Glancey, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp, Owen Hatherley and Jonathan Meades, who said of his account of Surrey:

Mere architectural description could not suffice for that land of joke-oak and real rhododendron; what it demands is an acute sense of place and the gift to render that sense. Nairn possessed both, and in his London book he showed a third gift, that of the realization of the emotional power of townscape. That trinity of gifts made him a great poet of the metropolis.

In 1997 Michael Bracewell toured some of Nairn's subjects in Surrey for the Travels with Pevsner TV series. In the 2005 film, Three Hours From Here Andrew Cross retraced the extensive journey across England that Nairn took to research and write Outrage in 1955. Jonathan Glancey undertook a similar odyssey for The Guardian in 2010.

Publications

• Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (Architectural Review special 1955; book: 1959)
• Counter Attack Against Subtopia (1957)
• Your England and how to defend it: A cautionary guide (Introduction only, 1960)
• Surrey (1962) (with Nikolaus Pevsner), Yale University Press, 2 edition Revised and Enlarged (1971), ISBN 978-0300096750
• Modern Buildings in London (1964), London Transport
• Your England Revisited (1964)
• The American Landscape: A Critical View (1965)
• The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965) (with Nikolaus Pevsner), Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-09677-4
• Nairn's London (1966), Penguin. Re-issued 1988 with updated entries by Peter Gasson, ISBN 978-0140092646. Original 1966 edition reprinted 2014, ISBN 978-0141396156
• Britain's Changing Towns (1967). Re-issued as Nairn's Towns in 2013 by Notting Hill Editions with an introduction and updates by Owen Hatherley. ISBN 978-1-907903-81-6
• Nairn's Paris (1968), Penguin

Television Series

Ian Nairn completed around 30 films for the BBC, all of which survive but none of which have yet been released on DVD. The three-part series Nairn Across Britain is currently available to view in the UK on the BBC's iPlayer internet television service.

• Nairn's North (1967)
• Nairn at Large (1969)
• Nairn's Europe (1970)
• Nairn's Journeys (1971–78)
• Nairn Across Britain (1972)

Further reading

• G. Darley and D.McKie (eds) Ian Nairn — Words in Place. Five Leaves Publications, 2013. ISBN 978-1907869877.
• David McKie, The Bruiser of Subtopia, The Guardian, 8 December 2005.
• Roger Ebert, Foreword to 2002 edition of Nairn's London ISBN 1-58579-044-3.
• Jonathan Glancey, The Voice of Outrage, The Guardian, 15 May 2010.

External links

• BBC: The man who hated the transformation of Britain