Chelsea Barracks, by Tripe & Wakeham, 1960–62. “An excellent exposition of the truth that very large buildings can maintain their scale with out changing into inhuman.” All images by Ian Nairn.
It appears a minimum of extremely applicable that when Ian Nairn’s Fashionable Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from considered one of 100 automated book-vending machines that had been put in in a number of inner-London prepare stations simply two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Computerized Firm, had been short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft noticed them axed in the course of the so-called Summer season of Love, by which era, and maybe because of Physician Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had slightly come off the thought of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A House Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, in spite of everything, lay just a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Level high-rise (a space-age monolith of kinds) in Canning City, East London—an occasion extensively credited with serving to to show most of the people in opposition to modernist structure.
State Home, Holburn, by Trehearne and Norman, Preston & Companions, 1956–60. “State Home is a courageous failure.”
Because it was, Nairn’s ebook was printed in the midst of a common election marketing campaign that noticed the Labour Celebration’s Harold Wilson change into prime minister on the promise of constructing “a brand new Britain” cast within the “white warmth” of a “scientific revolution.” And Fashionable Buildings in London is, for probably the most half, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the long run may convey—or undoubtedly much more so than a lot of Nairn’s subsequent output. That is an statement slightly than a criticism. In lots of respects, his rising disillusionment with the standard of latest buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Fashionable Buildings in London finds Nairn on the peak of his powers; it’s a ebook studded with as many pithy observations and startling ideas as cloves in a ham. Not not like D. H. Lawrence in his essays and journey books, Nairn’s sentences seem nearly to jump-start, as if touchdown midway by, punchy opinions falling immediately in quick-fire traces shorn of any pointless preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there’s rage right here, a lot of it directed towards the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork within the Clive Avenue neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I’m too indignant to write down a lot about it,” earlier than happening to argue that the previous streets by comparability had “ten occasions extra understanding of how folks reside and behave.”
Flats, St. James’s Place, by Denys Lasdun, 1960. “A masterpiece, and it may so simply have been a catastrophe.”
Whereas Nairn is definitely unstinting in his admiration for Stockwell Bus Storage (“most likely the noblest trendy constructing in London”), in at this time’s age of company branding and slick advertorial content material masquerading as journalism, that such a singular and authentic ebook was commissioned by no much less a public physique than London Transport appears nearly a miracle. It joined a collection of principally first rate if often extra plodding guides that the authority printed on this period. Priced at 5 shillings a go, the listing ranged from The Structure of Christopher Wren in and close to London to Customer’s London to Sportsman’s London. There was even a transfer into fiction when it branched out with a Well-known 5–model youngsters’s journey novel, The Tyrant King by Aylmer Corridor, which was later was a TV collection by Thames Tv starring Murray Melvin and soundtracked with songs by Pink Floyd and the Good. All these titles, although, match throughout the decidedly Reithian custom at London Transport to teach and inform its passengers, a convention that had been established within the twenties and thirties by its considerate chief govt Frank Choose, below whose watch posters by Man Ray and Harry Beck’s diagrammatical tube map had been licensed.
Bousfield Main Faculty, Previous Brompton Street and The Boltons, by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, 1955. “One of the imaginative new buildings in London, filled with concepts and filled with humanity too.”
These pocket guidebooks had been expressly produced with a view to encourage off-peak leisure exercise on its providers, at some extent when London Transport’s bread-and-butter revenues had been below risk from rising private-car possession and the slum clearance dispersal of the capital’s inhabitants to the suburbs and new cities. The latter, till their outer London Inexperienced Line bus service community was hived off in 1970, nonetheless fell throughout the firm’s huge catchment space, which at the moment, as Nairn notes, unfold from “Bishop’s Stortford in a single course [to] Guildford within the different.” Nairn’s “in London” purlieu due to this fact takes in slightly further-flung sights: from the bypasses at Nice Missenden in Buckinghamshire (“an excellent instance of the right way to match a contemporary street into mature English panorama”) to Gordon Secondary Faculty in Gravesend, Kent (“Price a go to, particularly if you’re acquainted (or bored) with glass-wall buildings …”).
St. Paul’s, Bow Frequent, Burdett Street and St. Paul’s Means, Stepney, by Robert Maguire, 1958–60. “The one trendy constructing within the London Transport space to replicate any actual credit score on the Church of England.”
Nairn had no architectural coaching, having studied arithmetic on the College of Birmingham earlier than becoming a member of the RAF as a pilot. It was as an aviator that he was tickled by the “concrete aeroplane … frankly carried out for enjoyable” on the highest of Nice Arthur Home within the Golden Lane Property by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, and by the brand new terminal at Gatwick Airport by Yorke Rosenberg Mardall (a “Swiss watch of a constructing”). Nairn started contributing items on structure to the Japanese Every day Information whereas stationed in Norfolk. He finally inveigled his method onto the employees of The Architectural Overview after a concerted letter-writing marketing campaign, and achieved nearly prompt notoriety on the age of twenty-four by authoring its particular “Outrage” subject of June 1955. Billed by Nairn within the introduction as “a prophecy of doom,” the problem was a polemic in opposition to waves of latest growth that, he argued, if left unchecked, would end in a Britain of “remoted oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows” with “no actual distinction between city and nation.” He dubbed this phenomenon “subtopia” and foretold that it could not be lengthy earlier than “the top of Southampton” appeared like “the start of Carlisle” and “the components in between” like “the top of Carlisle or the start of Southampton.”
Eastbourne Terrace, Paddington. C. H. Elsom and Companions 1958–60. “Proud and humble on the identical time: that is what occurs when you will have a extremely troublesome downside and look it straight within the eye.”
The thought of subtopia ignited debate about Britain’s constructed surroundings. Within the in style press of the day, Nairn was anointed as structure’s reply to the Offended Younger Males (although “Outrage” preceded John Osborne’s genre-spawning play, Look Again In Anger, by properly over a 12 months). As a determine venting dissent to an rising technology pissed off by the tempo of change, Nairn would go on to encourage a fully-fledged protest group. After giving an incendiary lecture on the Royal School of Artwork in 1958, a band of scholars, amongst them the pop artwork painter Pauline Boty, had been roused to discovered Anti-Ugly Motion. Its members took to the streets to precise their disgust with buildings they thought-about reactionary or offensive, in flamboyant style. They marched, for example, on the brand new Kensington Public Library, a neo-Georgian effort by E. Vincent Harris, in interval costume, accompanied by a Dixieland jazz band. Additionally they carried a cardboard coffin emblazoned with a banner bearing the legend RIP HERE LEYTH BRITISH ARCHITECTURE to Barclays Financial institution’s new headquarters on the nook of Lombard and Gracechurch Streets, a portland stone–clad classical edifice by A. T. Scott and Vernon Helbing. Their impression was important sufficient that each Nairn and the Anti-Uglies had been cited favorably within the Labour Celebration’s (admittedly unsuccessful) 1959 election manifesto. (What Nairn himself product of this, as slightly extra of a Tory anarchist with a distinctly antiegghead and individualistic streak who claimed to be too unsophisticated to reside in a Span home and distrusted Le Corbusier for his perceived contempt for odd folks, I’m not positive.)
Boundary Street Housing: Waltham Home (flats) 1954 and Dale Home (maisonettes), by Armstrong & MacManus, 1956. “Easy and superb—the simplicity of refinement of goal, not poverty of invention.”
Sixty years have elapsed since Nairn wrote Fashionable Buildings in London. In lots of locations, town has modified past recognition, for good and in poor health. London was, in lots of respects, a much more parochial place again then. Nairn is ashamed on the capital’s behalf that “the one constructing within the ebook by a international architect of worldwide repute” is Eero Saarinen’s “pompous and tragic” United States Embassy in Grosvenor Sq., a spot largely remembered now because the setting of protests in opposition to the Vietnam Conflict. Zidpark, Bowater Home, and the LCC’s Clive Avenue blocks have all gone. Final orders have lengthy since been known as on the modernist interiors of the Hoop pub in Notting Hill Gate by Robert Radford, which Nairn maintained had been “as elegantly deliberate as a set of Adam rooms.” On the time of writing, 55 Gracechurch Avenue, the one-time residence to the English, Scottish and Australian Financial institution, stands on the point of its second full rebuild since Nairn’s day. The primary occurred within the nineties, when British postwar modernist structure was at one thing of a essential low ebb. Throughout that interval, two extra of Nairn’s favorites, Denys Lasdun’s Peter Robinson division retailer on the Strand (“a traditional avenue entrance. You’ll be able to go it and all the time be refreshed”) and the Every day Mirror Constructing in Holborn (“one of many happiest trendy townscape results in London”) had been destroyed, additionally.
Royal School of Artwork, Kensington Gore, by H. T. Cadbury-Brown, 1961–62, and Sir Hugh Casson. “As accountable architecturally as Imperial School is irresponsible, with a character as sturdy because the Albert Corridor, subsequent door, but with out self-advertisement.”
The unique cowl for Fashionable Buildings in London, designed by Peter Robinson, depicted a crane with a London Transport roundel hanging from a hook. The picture is curiously paying homage to a gibbet. Nairn would come to develop more and more anxious about what he noticed because the high-handed reworking of the capital and of Britain at giant. In February 1966, he used his platform on the Observer to subject a 6,600-word screed titled “Cease the Architects Now” through which he castigated speculators, compliant political officers, and designers for his or her collusion within the demolition of first rate older buildings and for banishing pedestrians to dank, subterranean concrete lairs. Nairn’s London, printed later that 12 months, got here with a rejoinder urging its readers to hunt out a few of its entries earlier than they fell to the wrecking ball. That ball, satirically, in the end fell tougher on the fashionable buildings he’d championed than on the Georgian and Victorian edifices he thought-about most in danger. To learn Fashionable Buildings in London at this time is an act of time journey; the ebook is a ghost gazetteer whose coordinates map out a London that’s misplaced, no matter how lots of the buildings Nairn describes are nonetheless standing. However it’s no extra outdated than, say, the Beatles’s “Love Me Do.” Nairn’s voice comes throughout loud and clear: insistent, pressing, and stubborn, and, on events, simply plain incorrect. What he has to say in regards to the interplay between folks and locations is, at this time, as related as ever.
5 Cannon Lane, Hampstead, by Alexander Gibson, 1955. “Small, easy and fantastically detailed, in a labyrinthine a part of Hampstead which has in any other case stayed firmly within the Eighties.”
From the introduction to Ian Nairn’s Fashionable Buildings in London, out in a reissue from Notting Hill Editions subsequent month.
Travis Elborough is the creator of many books, together with Want You Have been Right here: England on Sea, The Lengthy-Participant Goodbye, By way of the Trying Glasses: The Spectacular Lifetime of Spectacles, and Atlas of Vanishing Locations, winner of Edward Stanford Journey E book Award in 2020.
