By Giles Elgood
LONDON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Arguably the best guide to London
published this season was written nearly 50 years ago.
“Nairn’s London” by Ian Nairn first appeared in 1966 and has
been reprinted after fans of the idiosyncratic architectural
enthusiast mounted a public campaign.
The author, a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot who
badgered the editors of the Architectural Review into giving him
a job and who went on to become the Observer’s architecture
critic, died of drink in 1983, aged 52.
He made his name as an agitator against poor quality
buildings being thrown up after the war, coining the derisive
term “Subtopia” for the damage being inflicted on Britain’s
suburbs and starting a campaign against bad modern architecture
called “Stop the Architects Now”.
Nairn’s guide to the capital contains 450 entries describing
churches, galleries, offices, houses, monuments, bridges,
markets, pubs and just about everything else between Uxbridge to
the west and Dagenham in the east.
Most of the buildings he writes about are still there,
although inevitably some have since changed use or disappeared.
He chose places the public could get into.
It’s an extraordinary catalogue, the product of an
exhausting amount of legwork enlivened by a literary style that
is waspish, informed and opinionated.
Nairn very much likes the Soane Museum, the former home of
the architect Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields now crammed
with his collection of art and antiquities.
Although unremarkable from the outside, what lies inside is
“an experience to be had in London and nowhere else, worth
travelling across a continent to see in the same way as the
Sistine Chapel or the Isenheim altarpiece”.
ELEPHANT’S BACKSIDE
Further north, an early Victorian development in Islington,
Milner Square, provokes an equally forthright reaction, this
time negative.
“Not to be missed in the sense that you ought to try
Fernet-Branca at least once,” Nairn says of the square’s
striking yellow brickwork and white pilasters. “It is as near to
expressing evil as a design can be.”
Highgate cemetery, the north London necropolis where Karl
Marx’s body lies and a popular spot for Sunday strollers, also
comes in for some criticism.
“This is the creepiest place in London,” writes Nairn.
“Nothing seems real but death at its creepiest and clammiest.
The cemetery closes well before dark, and a good job too.”
Not much escapes Nairn’s notice. Of the Albert Memorial,
Queen Victoria’s elaborate Kensington tribute to her Prince
Consort, Nairn says: “The elephant on one of the corners has a
backside just like a businessman scrambling under a restaurant
table for his cheque-book.”
Nairn is surprisingly ambivalent about some modern places.
Heathrow Airport is “squalid, messy, cluttered, a sea of
cars, a depressing introduction to London … maybe”.
The former pilot cannot resist seeing the airfield as a
showcase for its airliners, described as “those astonishing 600
mph packages, each one costing as much as Coventry Cathedral”.
According to an Afterword in the book by architectural
historian Gavin Stamp, Nairn once described himself as “a person
who drinks a lot and can’t bear either pretensions or
possessiveness”.
So of course he listed quite a few pubs. One to visit would
be the Wellington, centrally located on the corner of the Strand
and the Aldwych.
“Extraordinary-ordinary: comfortable and quietly elegant,
what every pub or street should be and isn’t,” was Nairn’s
verdict in the 1960s. It still looks much the same, although it
is probably more popular with tourists now.
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Gareth Jones)