Radstock, Somerset

Set in stone

The last of my trio of stone details from Radstock is this sign for the Bell Inn. I’ve posted quite a few inn signs in the past – a search of there blog will yield all kinds of three-dimensional animal ones, some lovely wrought iron, a couple of unique pub names, and one that overhangs an entire street. This is more modest, but I like the way it is integrated into the building, asserting its intention to remain a permanent fixture. And the inn is only part of the story. When it was rebuilt in the late-19th century, it adjoined a bewery, one of several hereabouts owned by the Coombs family and part of the Coombs’ Clandown and Radstock Breweries and Hotels company. Their Clandown bitter was well known in the West Country in its heyday, but now only part of the brewery building survives – but this sign, with the initials G.C. for George Coombs on the bell, still stands proud.

Just before I sat down to write this post a fortunate coincidence occurred. I was looking for another reason entirely at Ian Nairn: Words in Place, Gillian Darley and David McKie’s excellent book on Ian Nairn, one of the heroes of this blog. As I glanced at a page, the word ‘Radstock’ jumped out and I was reminded that this Somerset town was one of a number listed by Nairn in The Observer in January 1965 in a list of ‘threatened towns’. When I’m not snowed under with other work, I’ll have to look up the back issue of The Observer and find out what Nairn said about it – no doubt he appreciated the chunky industrial buildings and evidence of the mine working, and no doubt he liked the way the buildings had got grimy, the very grime giving character to the place and acting as a record of years of history and work. He could enthuse such qualities, in a way few could back in 1965.

At least one of Nairn’s readers, Graham Fisher (an admirer of Nairn), demurred. Nairn wrote back to him, thanking him for his comments and adding, ‘If you don’t see what I saw in Radstock, that’s marvellous: you’ve gone there and looked and assessed.’ That, above all was what Nairn asked of his readers: go, look, respond. He went his own way, and encouraged others to do so too. Nairn’s way inevitably was via a pub, and I like to imagine him drinking in here – before the drink got to him and ruined his health. His responses to places were often provocative, but always honest – they were what he felt, and made all his readers look, and respond, anew.

Newent, Gloucestershire

Hats on

These recent weeks of hot weather have seen me more often than not wearing a hat when out and about. The media have been full of advice about covering up and I’ve also seen statistics about the great temperature difference in the shade. I don’t need statistics, though – in sun this hot I instinctively make for shadows, overhangs, arcades, and other refuges, like this lovely timber-framed market house or Butter Market, built in c. 1668 in Newent. It has one big room upstairs and a ground-floor open-sided space for a market: the same layout as many others in English and Welsh towns. The timber work on the end in the sun is quite plain, but the side facing the street has a winning combination of diagonal and curved braces, together with curvy bargeboards to please the eye. The weather vane – in the form of a running fox – is an added touch of charm that catches the sun.

The space for the market has quite a low ceiling – there are about ten feet of headroom – and if not a forest at least a grove of thick supporting posts. The effect of standing inside it reminded me of a description by Ian Nairn of another market house, the one in Llanidloes. Nairn described the even lower space in the market house there as ‘a very personal possessed space: it is not so much a question of walking in but of putting it on like a hat.’ In Newent I tried on the building myself for a minute, before walking out again into the sunshine. The fit was not bad at all.

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§ See Ian Nairn, Nairn’s Towns (updated edition, Notting Hill Editions, 2013)

From Blackpool to Cowes

Up-tiddly-up-up

I don’t know when I first became aware of the photographs produced by Aerofilms Limited. Looking back to the 1960s and 1970s, it just seemed that every aerial photograph of a British subject reproduced in a book – a book about architecture or archaeology or scenery or whatever – was credited to the company. Gradually I realised how many they must have taken, and that they stood in a proud tradition. It was a tradition founded by the pioneers of aerial archaeology, the men (they were usually men in those days) who realised that you could see so much from an aircraft (lumps, bumps, crop marks, scorch marks, visual patterns and clues) that could tell you about the archaeology of a place, even about what was underground and could hardly be guessed at from the surface. People like O. G. S. Crawford*, pioneer of field archaeology and aerial archaeology; and Major George Allen, pilot and aerial photographer who thought nothing of taking his hands of the controls of his aeroplane to lean out and take photographs – and then leaning back in and changing the plate in his camera, while still flying ‘hands free’. And later on, people like the writer Ian Nairn, whose experience as a pilot helped turn him into an architectural critic because he wanted to tell people what he could see of buildings when he looked down on them from the sky.

For almost 100 years, aerial photography has been showing us our buildings and landscapes from revealing angles, and Aerofilms played a major part in this work. Three men in the photograph above are Aerofilms pilots and photographers in a De Havilland D9.B in 1919, the year the company was founded: clearly they have enough manpower to leave the pilot in control of the plane while someone else does the camera work.†

The other day I was reminded of all this when looking at something on the BBC website: a fascinating video celebration of Aerofilms’ work. Their early photographers went up in open-topped biplanes and leaned over the side of the cockpit to take images of whatever they could see when the weather was clear – town and country, industry and pastoral, buildings and other aircraft, everything from a cathedral to washing blowing on the line (a good flying day was also a good drying day).

Places and buildings depicted in the video include Blackpool, Windsor Castle, Highclere Castle, Chatsworth, Glasgow, Doncaster, Stoke (with its bottle kilns), Swindon (the GWR works looming large), Bracknell (before it was a new town), Romford (when it was still a market town), Coventry (before the bombing, but with clearances for new development already taking place), and St Paul's Cathedral. There are glimpses of sporting events such as cricket matches, Ascot, Wimbledon, the FA Cup final, and Cowes Week. The Aerofilms aircraft flies over plywood battleships, housing developments, and prefabs. We can see the ghosts of old field boundaries caught between streets of new houses. And the history of aviation, so germane to this project, is there with shots of biplanes, an autogyro, and what was left after the Aerofilms plane crashed into a lake.

The Aerofilms archive, which is being conserved and digitised by English Heritage and the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments for Scotland and Wales, is still a priceless resource. Here’s to those magnificent men.

Click the rectangle to play the video 

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*I often wondered what those initials stood for. Osbert Guy Stanhope, it turns out. His life (the life of his mind, especially) is carefully excavated and movingly evoked in Kitty Hauser’s outstanding book Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, 2008).
†For more on Aerofilms, see James Crawford et al,  Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above (English Heritage, 2014).
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The photograph at the top of this post is from the Aerofilms archive. The collection can be accessed via the Historic England website, here.

Poet of places

The man who fought the planners

For many, I know, the period between Christmas and the New Year is a dead time, especially for those who don’t fancy what in the UK are still referred to as ‘the January sales’ – the post-Christmas time when the shops lure us on to the High Street with promises of massively discounted goods. Now many of the the sales start before Christmas anyway. But there’s always television or that Christmas-stocking box-set or whatever the online suppliers can offer…

Or maybe something a little different. I thought one or two of my readers might like The Man Who Fought the Planners, a documentary about the writer and broadcaster Ian Nairn that was made a while back and has surfaced on YouTube. Ian Nairn (1930–1953) was a writer, broadcaster, and poet of descriptive prose whose work I’ve enthused about before. My review of a an excellent book about him will fill in the background for those who don’t know about him; my account of Nairn’s London, which I think is his best book and one of the all-time best books on London, is here.

If you want something to cheer you up in the post-Christmas gloom, this video may not be a good idea. This is, after all, a documentary about a man who drank himself to death, who spent a lot of energy lamenting destructive planning decisions, and even whose enthusiasms, which are many and revealing, are expressed with a kind of melancholy. But fans of Nairn will know that his observations on buildings and, especially, places are the things that make this unlikely and unglamorous broadcaster worth watching – the insights into townscapes, the sense of space, the love of the unloved. The memories of those who knew him, worked with him, or who, like me, are simply people who like his writing and have benefitted from his perceptions – all these are valuable too.

Revisits

A top ten of 2014

Before we advance into a new year of architectural encounters, it occurred to me to take a look at what my readers have found most interesting during the last year – or which of my 2014 posts, at any rate, have been viewed the most. I have compiled a top ten, and they are a mixed bunch indeed, featuring mostly modest buildings such as prefabs, a shop front, some almshouses, and a public lavatory. They also include some memorable architectural details and a couple of reviews (of the recent exhibition of Edwin Smith’s photographs and the reprint of Nairn’s London). Miscellaneous as they are, they seem to represent a reasonable if partial cross-section of my interests and, I hope, those of my readers to.

They are:

Far from ordinary: the story of prefabs in Catford, south London, notable examples of the glory of the ordinary.

A sort of Jacobethan: a whimsical but interesting bit of pseudo-Jacobean detail in Northampton. God, or the Devil as they say these days (and well they might in these unMiesian contexts), is in the details.

Hygienic high-style: a terrific Art Deco shopfront in Ashby de la Zouch, showing that Deco can be about restraint as well as showing off.

The essence of place: the stand-out exhibition of the photographs of Edwin Smith (closed now, but it’s still worth reading about this photographic master).

What we see, and when we see it: a meditation in Malmesbury about how photography often reveals what we don’t see.

Fifty years on: a personal memory of some almshouses in Louth and the architecture of James Fowler.

Old orders changing: an unusual classical order in Clifton (pictured above).

The ladies, vanishing: a memorable cinema in Cheltenham, which is no more.

Being moved in London: a review of my favourite book about London, which has recently been reprinted.

From the sun to the stars: a cast-iron public lavatory in Bath.

Happy New Year to you all.

Being moved in London

Ian Nairn, Nairn’s London
Reprint, published by Penguin Books

The final book review in my pre-Christmas handful is rather different from the others. It’s not of a recent book, but a reprint, not of a new discovery, but an old favourite. This review, in fact, returns to a subject that has occupied the English Buildings blog before: the writing of architectural critic, topographer, and television presenter Ian Nairn…

Right. I’m going to suggest that you do something rather extraordinary. I am gong to suggest that you buy a guidebook that’s nearly 50 years out of date. More than that, I’m going to recommend that you read it. And more even than that, I’m going to encourage you to start at the beginning, with the insular City of London, and read to the end, with the book’s evocation of the bare landscape around what was in 1966 still called London Airport. Nairn’s London is that different and that good.

Ian Nairn prefaced his guide by saying, ‘This book is a record of what has moved me, between Uxbridge and Dagenham.’ His descriptions of London buildings and London scenes benefit from much architectural knowledge (Nairn can evoke Sangallo and Bramante as he contemplates the Banqueting House in Whitehall; he knows when to compare something to Le Corbusier). He knows some history, but doesn’t dwell on it. What counts is his personal responses – the way he is moved – and what he has to say about the visual and spatial impact of buildings and places.

And when he is moved, Nairn’s language really takes off. In St Mary Woolnoth space is so tangible that ‘you can experience, for the price of a bus ticket to the City, the super-reality of the mystics or mescalin’. The improvisatory interior of St Mary Abchurch ‘looks like the result of a scribble on a menu card, and it works perfectly’. All Saints’ Margaret Street is like an orgasm. St Mary, Ealing, is ‘A rag-bag with enough ideas for a dozen churches: and a splendid place for a boggle.’ It’s not all churches, though, and certainly not all landmark buildings. Nairn is just as happy with obscure corners such as the wonderful Goodwin’s Court off St Martin’s Lane, its Georgian bow windows ’as unexpected as anything in London’, and Lazenby Court, which begins like ‘the end of the world’, continues via ‘an evil stretch of dark brick’, and ends with ‘a more than comforting pub’.

Pubs there are a-plenty in Nairn’s London. Critics are fond of saying that the book includes 27 of them, a figure reached by counting the entries in the thematic index. Actually there are more, because pubs mentioned en passant, like the one in the entry on Lazenby Court (the Lamb and Flag), aren’t listed there. The 27 range from the Red Lion in Duke of York Street, which, thanks in part to its mirror-lined interior, ‘throws you back on your own resources’, to Hampstead’s The Spaniards, which Nairn likes because it is unlike other Hampstead pubs which are ‘like a private society whose performance is not worth the entrance fee  – the intellectual equivalent of the Soho striptease club’.

Pubs did for Nairn in the end, which came too soon when he died of the effects of too much alcohol, in his fifties. There are signs of a decline in his late work, but Nairn’s London doesn’t show this, unless one finds his writing itself intoxicating. The comparisons can be far out, but they’re revealing nonetheless. Often they compare architecture to the other arts. Nash, he was fond of saying, is like Offenbach. The greenhouse at Syon House is a Schubertian frolic. Pubs remind him of Manet or Seurat.

I could go on, quoting his entries for such outré places as the Agapemonite Church in Clapton, Eros House in Catford, Huck’s Chalet in Hampton, or Lululand in Bushey. But even if you don’t know this extraordinary book, you probably have the idea by now. They are very personal responses but not so idiosyncratic that they’re not deeply revealing. They’re open-minded responses too. They celebrate grimy buildings as well as pristine ones, the famous and the obscure, the public and the private, Hawksmoor and Butterfield, modern and antique. And although our likes may not be quite the same as Nairn’s the writing makes us want to get out and see what is being described.

The blurb on the original edition tells us to get out quickly, as some of its subjects were already disappearing in 1966. By now, almost half a century on, quite a bit of Nairn’s London has been demolished, although the book is still worth reading as a guide to what’s left. But more than this, the lost buildings and vanished, scarred streets live on through Nairn’s animating prose.

- - -

To be clear: Penguin have reprinted the first edition of Nairn’s London without changes or revisions, as the classic that it is. (There was, a few decades ago, another edition, with revisions by Peter Gasson which are not included here.) For old time’s sake, my picture shows the cover of the first edition, which has been reproduced for the reprint, but with glowing review quotes replacing the destinations in the white panels on the bus. That’s Nairn himself, at the wheel.

Back on the town

What, has this thing appeared again tonight? (4)

My fourth New Year reprise, and the most visited post of the year in spite of the fact that it was only written a month ago, is a book review. In a way I'm surprised. But this is a review of an important book, and one central to many readers of the English Buildings blog. Ian Nairn is a kind of presiding spirit here, one of my favourite writers about buildings and places, author of, I think, the best book about London, inspirer of the Civic Trust, poet of architectural outrage, consummate broadcaster. Intellectual, questioning, melancholy, observant, dead too soon,* when he gets it right, as so often in Nairn's London and in the reprinted essays on towns that make up the bulk of the volume I was reviewing in September, he does attain a kind of poetic evocation that's hard to beat. It's what he was after, as the quotation at the bottom of the right-hand column of this blog shows. Here's what I wrote about Nairn's Towns, published by Notting Hill Editions:

Even I, a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, find it hard to believe now what a service the magazine The Listener did in bringing fresh and thoughtful analysis of current affairs and culture to the attention of so many in Britain. The magazine's brief was to put into print the best of the words broadcast by the BBC, but it cast its net wider than this, commissioning new pieces as well. It was a kind of Third Programme in print that I, for one, was fortunate to find in the school library every week. One thing it commissioned was a series of articles by Ian Nairn on British towns, from Canterbury to Newcastle, Cardiff to Cumbernauld. They were printed in The Listener in 1961 and 1964, and revised and reprinted in book form, as Britain's Changing Towns, in 1967. Here they are again, introduced by Owen Hatherley, who also provides brief updates to each essay, outlining what has happened to each town in the intervening years. They make fascinating and invigorating reading and, given that there is little else of Nairn in print (except for his contributions to the Pevsner volumes on Sussex and the outstanding Surrey), this beautifully produced volume from Notting Hill Editions is a good place to start.
No one before or since saw places quite the way Nairn did, no one has quite his combination of clear eye, willingness to look at the unregarded, and his particular prismatic quality of mind, an unusual blend of melancholy and enthusiasm. Time and time again he singles out the unexpected architectural highlights – a gents in a Birmingham pub and another in Liverpool, the Jarrold's printing works in Norwich, oddities like the Egyptian-style Oddfellows' Hall in Devonport. He comes out with judgements that make you think again, or look anew – English Perpendicular churches have a hysterical quality, he says; the Georgian churches of Marylebone are too 'polite'; soot-blackened or dirty buildings, from Birmingham to Sheffield, have a grandeur of their own.
It's not all oddity and perversity, though. When he gets stuck in, Nairn describes buildings and places beautifully, and gives one a sense of what makes them tick. He is particularly good on the way buildings, roads, and terrain interact – on townscape, in other words. Describing the slightly off-kilter central crossroads in Llanidloes, or the dramatic changes of level in Newcastle, or the American-style grid plan of Glasgow, or the varied grain of Brighton, he is at his best.
Good too, are the turns – and turns again – of phrase. He responds to buildings viscerally, and this often comes across in the physicality of his language. A flight of steps in Newcastle 'sucks you in like a vortex'; the meat and fish markets in Sheffield offer 'a staggering perspective of hooks and flesh'; St Bartholomew's in Brighton is 'more like a volcanic convulsion than a building'; the low ceiling height of the open ground floor of the Market Hall in Llanidloes means that when you step into it you put it on 'like a hat'. There are often comparisons with the other arts – a group of buildings can be like a fugue and the architecture of Nash is like Offenbach, an inspired comparison, that, with its overtones of the elegant, the cheeky, the sophisticated, the classical, the continental, and the not-quite-proper.
Nairn is discerning about architecture. He can see that some old buildings are dull, and that many modern buildings are bad, but finds room to praise the good ones and to appreciate the best of modern planning, while pouring scorn on the worst. His appreciation of townscapes and buildings comes from the heart, as his warmed-up turns of phrase reveal, but his mind is at work too, analysing and making suggestions for the future.
Did the planners take any notice? Owen Hatherley's postscripts to each essay tell us how things have gone in the half century since the accounts were first written. The reports vary a lot, of course. Canterbury and Chester have managed to conserve a lot, without putting up many very distinguished new buildings. Glasgow and Manchester have found new vigour, and some good new buildings, but at the expense of much sub-standard development. And so on. Hatherley mostly responds positively to the older writer's judgements, but rightly notes that Nairn's apolitical standpoint could land him in trouble – Nairn was optimistic about Derry in 1967, but it saw the beginning of the Troubles in 1968.
Hatherley is one of those, though, who have learned much from Nairn, and know it. In the postscripts he notices quite a few buildings and bits of planning that Nairn would have seized on. In one of the Fife towns he notices a 'staggeringly good' secondhand bookshop. I do not think Nairn's Towns will be ending up in that shop any time soon. People will want to hang on to this book. And rightly so. 

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* If these are Hamlet-like qualities, they are half an excuse for the heading I have used for this series. Some of my readers, I'm sure, will recognise that line, 'What, has this thing appeared again tonight?' as coming from the first act of Hamlet, where it refers to the ghost of the prince's father. And perhaps the ghostliness is a better reason for the quotation. Not only are these four posts ghostly reappearances of material previously posted, but they are also in part summonings-up of ghosts – ghosts of little known theatre architects, of builders of tin churches, of Laurie Lee, of Ian Nairn. All re-encountered through traces they have left behind.

On the town

Next in my series of book reviews, Ian Nairn (and Owen Hatherley) on Britain's towns...

Ian Nairn, Nairn's Towns, introduced by Owen Hatherley
Published by Notting Hill Editions

Even I, a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, find it hard to believe now what a service the magazine The Listener did in bringing fresh and thoughtful analysis of current affairs and culture to the attention of so many in Britain. The magazine's brief was to put into print the best of the words broadcast by the BBC, but it cast its net wider than this, commissioning new pieces as well. It was a kind of Third Programme in print that I, for one, was fortunate to find in the school library every week. One thing it commissioned was a series of articles by Ian Nairn on British towns, from Canterbury to Newcastle, Cardiff to Cumbernauld. They were printed in The Listener in 1961 and 1964, and revised and reprinted in book form, as Britain's Changing Towns, in 1967. Here they are again, introduced by Owen Hatherley, who also provides brief updates to each essay, outlining what has happened to each town in the intervening years. They make fascinating and invigorating reading and, given that there is little else of Nairn in print (except for his contributions to the Pevsner volumes on Sussex and the outstanding Surrey), this beautifully produced volume from Notting Hill Editions is a good place to start.

No one before or since saw places quite the way Nairn did, no one has quite his combination of clear eye, willingness to look at the unregarded, and his particular prismatic quality of mind, an unusual blend of melancholy and enthusiasm. Time and time again he singles out the unexpected architectural highlights – a gents in a Birmingham pub and another in Liverpool, the Jarrold's printing works in Norwich, oddities like the Egyptian-style Oddfellows' Hall in Devonport. He comes out with judgements that make you think again, or look anew – English Perpendicular churches have a hysterical quality, he says; the Georgian churches of Marylebone are too 'polite'; soot-blackened or dirty buildings, from Birmingham to Sheffield, have a grandeur of their own.

It's not all oddity and perversity, though. When he gets stuck in, Nairn describes buildings and places beautifully, and gives one a sense of what makes them tick. He is particularly good on the way buildings, roads, and terrain interact – on townscape, in other words. Describing the slightly off-kilter central crossroads in Llanidloes, or the dramatic changes of level in Newcastle, or the American-style grid plan of Glasgow, or the varied grain of Brighton, he is at his best.

Good too, are the turns – and turns again – of phrase. He responds to buildings viscerally, and this often comes across in the physicality of his language. A flight of steps in Newcastle 'sucks you in like a vortex'; the meat and fish markets in Sheffield offer 'a staggering perspective of hooks and flesh'; St Bartholomew's in Brighton is 'more like a volcanic convulsion than a building'; the low ceiling height of the open ground floor of the Market Hall in Llanidloes means that when you step into it you put it on 'like a hat'. There are often comparisons with the other arts – a group of buildings can be like a fugue and the architecture of Nash is like Offenbach, an inspired comparison, that, with its overtones of the elegant, the cheeky, the sophisticated, the classical, the continental, and the not-quite-proper.

Nairn is discerning about architecture. He can see that some old buildings are dull, and that many modern buildings are bad, but finds room to praise the good ones and to appreciate the best of modern planning, while pouring scorn on the worst. His appreciation of townscapes and buildings comes from the heart, as his warmed-up turns of phrase reveal, but his mind is at work too, analysing and making suggestions for the future.

Did the planners take any notice? Owen Hatherley's postscripts to each essay tell us how things have gone in the half century since the accounts were first written. The reports vary a lot, of course. Canterbury and Chester have managed to conserve a lot, without putting up many very distinguished new buildings. Glasgow and Manchester have found new vigour, and some good new buildings, but at the expense of much sub-standard development. And so on. Hatherley mostly responds positively to the older writer's judgements, but rightly notes that Nairn's apolitical standpoint could land him in trouble – Nairn was optimistic about Derry in 1967, but it saw the beginning of the Troubles in 1968.

Hatherley is one of those, though, who have learned much from Nairn, and know it. In the postscripts he notices quite a few buildings and bits of planning that Nairn would have seized on. In one of the Fife towns he notices a 'staggeringly good' secondhand bookshop. I do not think Nairn's Towns will be ending up in that shop any time soon. People will want to hang on to this book. And rightly so.

Love and outrage

For ten days or so, English Buildings turns into a book blog as I review some of the new publications that have struck me this year. To begin with, a book about a presiding spirit of this blog, the writer and broadcaster, Ian Nairn...

Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place
Published by Five Leaves Publications

There's a YouTube video in which Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades discuss their work. Before long, the name of Ian Nairn comes up, an inspiration for both writers for his fresh reactions to places, his combative stance towards architects, and his bracing prose style. His guidebook to London (Nairn's London, 1966) is singled out for particular praise. In the comments accompanying the video, some young, interested watchers exchange views: 'Who is that bloke they talked about? Ian Nunn? Ian Nenn?' Ian Nairn: Words in Place tells them what they need to know, combining a study of his work with such biographical facts as are useful for an understanding of the man and his writing.

Briefly, born in Bedford in 1930 and raised in Surrey, Nairn read mathematics at Birmingham University before going into the Royal Air Force. As he flew, he looked down towards England's towns and villages and landscapes: the first of the series of views from odd angles that drove his career. He realised that his aerial views of England gave him unique insights into the buildings on the ground – that he could often see what earthbound architectural historians could not. Oddly, he could do the same thing when standing on terra firma too. By the early 1950s he was sending articles to the Architectural Review.

Ian Nairn: Words in Place describes this unusual career. It begins with the story of how Nairn exploded on to the scene of architectural writing in 1955 with his first masterpiece, Outrage. Outrage was Nairn's special edition of the Architectural Review chronicling the destructive effects on the environment of the tendency to reduce once-individual places to the same mediocre and uniform pattern. To make this point, Nairn drove from Southampton to Carlisle, taking photographs of everything grim and similar – lamp posts, semi-detached houses, telegraph poles, badly designed signs, misplaced factories, gauche roundabouts, wires, wires, wires. For the result he coined a new term, subtopia, a word that suggests suburbia and well as dystopia, and that was intended to embody the fact that soon 'the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle' with everything in between looking the same too. Outrage, trenchantly argued, angry, emotional, laid out with the graphic flair that characterized the AR in the 1950s, caught the imagination and fired people up. It was soon republished as a book, and spawned a sequel, Counter-attack, which suggested what to do about the mess, with examples of good planning and design. Outrage and Counter-attack were Nairn's seminal early works.

Darley and McKie chronicle the creation and impact of these early triumphs (the formation of the Civic Trust was one result). They continue with the other landmarks of Nairn's career – his book on America, The American Landscape; his work with Pevsner on the Buildings of England volumes for Sussex and Surrey; his guidebooks to London and Paris; his relationship with the professions; his journalism; and his television work. Each chapter is accompanied by a short commentary in which another writer describes their response to a specific part of Nairn's oeuvre – Jonathan Meades on Nairn and the Buildings of England, Owen Hatherley on Nairn and the Professions, and David Thomson and Andrew Saint on Nairn's London, for example.

It's Nairn's London that stands out as the other masterpiece, a love-song to a great city in the form of a guidebook, as radically and whackily positive as Outrage was negative. As ever with Nairn, what stand out are the unusual choices of buildings (27 pubs, a timber merchant's, the Agapemonite Church in Clapton, gloomy alleys, a boat-builder's Swiss chalet, the odd council estate, Eros House in Catford), the striking and sometimes assertive prose, the insistence on the importance of being moved, emotionally, by what he sees. It's that emotion that's the key. When a building moves him, when he loves a place, his prose takes off and you want to dash out and look at the place yourself. How could one resist a church that resembles an orgasm, or a bank that looks like something left when the seas receded, or a bit of public art that is 'energy made visible'? The arresting prose can be mind-boggling, but it always conveys something about the place. Nairn's London can still tell you more about the capital than a dozen newly-minted, media-savvy, buzzword-saturated guidebooks. It is good to know that there are plans to reprint it.

Ian Nairn: Words in Place is a celebration of all this, but it's also an elegy to a man who died too soon. Alcoholism got him, and, with a sheaf of ideas in his trademark raincoat pocket for further, unwritten books (Nairn's Industrial North – if only), he died, at just 53. His books, very much of their time, have been little reprinted, but Nairn should remain important to all who think about Britain's places and buildings. Never a favourite with architects (though appreciative of many modern buildings, he wrote a famous Observer article headed 'Stop the architects now!') he has always been read by people who, like himself, care about architecture but have no architectural qualifications. He still deserves to be read, and so does this engaging account of his work.