Nairn's Towns

“Once you discover [Nairn] you want to read everything he’s written.”

“You could see that Nairn was made of equal parts of amiability and disagreeableness, that he could swoon, but only over the very finest things; that he could take joy in the most ordinary streetscape if it could be shown to make daily life better; and that he could always be counted on to prefer the work of an eccentric genius like Nicholas Hawksmoor over that of a sane and rational architect like Christopher Wren.”

“It’s not easy to pigeonhole the late English writer Ian Nairn. But after reading his work you might rightly decide that there’s no need to do so. His rubric doesn’t matter because, whatever kind of writer he is, he follows his own meandering counsel, and the results are consistently brilliant.”

“To call Ian Nairn a great architectural writer is too restrictive; he was a great writer who happened to write about buildings and places….Cities change, but the quality of Nairn’s writing will always hold. He will take you to unexpected places, make you look at the familiar anew, or at least poke you into thinking about them again.”

‘Should be kept in the glove-box of every car.’

Ian Nairn was a former Royal Air Force pilot with no architecture qualifications. In 1955 Nairn coined the term Subtopia to describe his prophetic vision of an architecturally homogenised Britain. In the 1960s Nairn contributed to Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series and published Nairn’s London and Nairn’s Paris. In the 1970s Nairn moved into television, producing Nairn’s Travels and Nairn Across Britain for the BBC. A noted drinker, Nairn’s work is full of descriptions of pubs and recommendations for beers. He died in 1983 aged 53.Owen Hatherley is a London-based writer and journalist writing primarily on architecture, politics and culture. Hatherley has written for Building Design, the Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review and Socialist Worker. His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an “intelligent and passionately argued attempt to ‘excavate utopia’ from the ruins of modernism”. Hatherly’s book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.