– Introduction –

The book you hold in your hands was the making (if quite possibly ultimately the breaking) of the brilliant architectural writer and broadcaster Ian Nairn. It first appeared in June 1955, initially as a standalone, if incendiary, edition of theArchitectural Review magazine entitledOutrage, but was rapidly reissued as a book. (As you will discover ‘theReview’ itself is sometimes spoken about in the third person throughout the book.) Nairn was just twenty-four and so a full year ahead of John Osborne’s jazz-loving Jimmy Porter he was hailed in the national press as the prototypical angry young man. What irked this Brillo-haired young upstart, however, was not the Church, the Sunday papers and a posh wife insistent on the ironing, but the sorry state of Britain’s built environment. It was a topic that consumed him for the remainder of what proved to be a furiously productive (or perhaps more accurately, productively furious) if tragically all-too-short career. Succumbing to alcoholism, driven by melancholic despair, he was to drink himself to death twenty-eight years later. By which time he was a largely forgotten figure, despite briefly being as familiar a face on television as Sir John Betjeman.

With Nairn it is sometimes too easy to become fixated on that end and the unfulfilled potential. The grim stories of liquid lunches at the St George’s Tavern pub near his home in Pimlico, where pints were consumed by the dozen almost daily. All those books promised (Nairn’s London Countryside,The Industrial North,Nairn’s Florence) that never materialised and the tide of beer that gradually swept away his much-cherished pilot’s licence, a regular berth at theSunday Times and any further work at the BBC and finally, after lapsing into a prolonged silence, his life, in 1983 at age fifty-two. But this is to overlook how much he achieved and the impact his extraordinary writing had on the ge