Something Is At Stake

Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place

Five Leaves, 160pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781907869877

reviewed by Pete Maxwell

There is a scene from the television series Ian Nairn’s Journeys, the episode where he takes the Orient Express through Europe to its terminus in Istanbul, that everyone familiar with the architecture critic recalls. Nairn has arrived at his first stop, Munich, where he delivers a succinct interpretation of the city from atop the town hall. The camera then switches to a night shot of a fairground ride, a gentle German ballad playing in the background, then to Nairn on the ground, trapped in a sea of revellers. His face is anguished and starkly lit as he chases the retreating camera crew through a crowded beer festival, pushing past (and sometimes just pushing) people. Eventually he becomes so apoplectic at what he sees – the tourist driven degradation of Germanic culture – that he looses control of his voice, breaking off in a high-pitched grunt.

This vaguely amusing image is in fact key to understanding why Nairn was such an important figure in the history of architecture and, arguably more so, modern cultural criticism. It also gives credence to the revivification of the man aimed at by a new book, Ian Nairn: Words in Place, edited by Gillian Darley and David McKie. Nairn was a dilettante with no formal training in architecture, or its histories. His career was ignited by a need to make himself heard in respect to the great wrongs he felt were being perpetrated against Britain’s built heritage, a love incongruously fostered while flying over his native country during a brief stint as an RAF pilot. There his efforts went into spotting churches rather than enemies (this was the early 50s). That experience lit a flame for which Nairn’s return to the ground in pursuit of a writing career is a powerful metaphor – being in the thick of it was the source of Nairn’s rhetorical power and much of his ire, reading the everyday experience of first Britain’s, then continental Europe’s and America’s, built environment. He disdained to float on the airy breath of architectural trends as other critics did. Twenty years later, striding through Munich as the words catch in his throat, Nairn makes evident his true value: it wasn’t erudition or technical knowledge, nor even lexical dexterity, though he had all three in abundance, but a passion that derives from a close association, both physical and emotional, with his subject.

Words in Place is the first serious examination of Nairn’s oeuvre. Indeed, it comes at a time when most of Nairn’s major works, specifically his rambunctious city guides, Nairn’s London and Nairn’s Paris, are out of print, despite being among the best of their genre. If Penguin are at fault, so too are the BBC: Nairn’s film work has been similarly overlooked, unavailable on any medium other than YouTube bootlegs. Given that, you might wonder whether the project to reanimate Nairn might have started most obviously by republishing, if not the works owned by major publishers, then maybe the magazine and newspaper journalism from such titles as the Architectural Review (his big break) and The Observer. Instead Words in Place provides, not a biography, but a companion to Nairn as told by a series of writers all of whom are fans of his prose and some of whom are a direct continuation of his legacy.

The most pertinent of these is Owen Hatherley, the young British writer on architecture and politics whose books charting the UK in the aftermath of noughties ‘pseudo modernism’ share a similar commitment to locatedness and persistence. (Incidentally, Hatherley also chaired the conversation at the London Review of Books launch of Words in Place). Indeed it was Nairn’s mistrust, not of Modernism itself but of the wholesale indoctrination of the postwar rebuilding programme in its ideologies, which spurred his first great triumph, Outrage – a special issue of the AR.

Here Hatherley contributes a chapter on the architectural professions’ antipathy towards Nairn, dismissive of those external to its academe, the younger man affectionately referring to him as the ‘autodidact’s autodidact’. Another who might be seen as a successor to Nairn, albeit far earlier, is the critic and broadcaster Jonathan Meades. Both men shared a certain lugubrious quality as they wandered through the British topography, skipping or trudging as content dictated, though Nairn’s earnestness was counterbalanced by Meades’ dour humour. Together, along with John Betjeman, they wrote the book on bringing architecture to the small screen, lessons that few have sadly learnt. Meades has, rather knowingly, avoided the chapter on Nairn’s television career (that falls to newspaper columnist Jonathan Glancey) opting instead to share in his love for and subsequent disillusionment with the Buildings of England, Nikolaus Pevsner’s admired but divisive taxonomy of stone Albion to which Nairn contributed one and a half volumes.

Elsewhere, historian Gavin Stamp details Nairn’s Outrage period; journalist Veronica Horwell his fateful time in America; writer and curator Deyan Sudjic his time as a columnist for various newspapers, and editor Andrew Saint his twin books on London and Paris. Each are attentively and entertainingly written, but I pick out both Meades and Hatherley because their sections are the ones written in a manner that rings with that Nairnite passion that something is at stake. It echoes naturally in them because they are part of his lineage. They share in his fierce romanticism – the belief that architecture as a discipline is of vital concern to the majority — least to the people that have power to affect it, and most to those who would never dream of being able to.

Nairn remains, due to his untimely death through drink and darkness in 1983, the most obscure of that line of English writers on architecture, which includes Betjeman, Pevsner and EM Forster before him, and several after (many, if we include the ‘psycho geographers’). But he is also the most potent, precisely because he was the greatest outsider, perquisite for any committed wandering soul. Words in Place is a double introduction to Nairn, one that reintroduces the man, but also hopes to act as a catalyst to making his works newly available — as such it is not the book the uninitiated want, for that would surely be his largely unavailable writing, but it is the book they need. We will start first with the man: in Nairn’s case, as a critic who always placed the populace before the building, and most certainly the architecture, that is most appropriate. Darley and McKie’s project will succeed if it convinces us not to adopt the better qualities of his prose, but of his person.
Pete Maxwell s a London-based writer and critic, and a graduate of the Royal College of Art’s Critical Writing in Art and Design programme.