‘Nairn’s London’, by Ian Nairn (1966)
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, History, Books, London, Architecture

‘Nairn’s London’, by Ian Nairn (1966)

The best guide book to London is not really a guide book to London. In fact, Ian Nairn’s “personal list of the best things in London” may also be the best book on the city ever written.

(Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on 7 October 2010. A half-written entry on Ian Nairn’s book ‘Nairn’s London’ had been lying dormant for almost a year at that point. But a conversation on Twitter between me, Kieran Long (of the Evening Standard), Justin McGuirk (of The Guardian), Charles Holland (of FAT), and Owen Hatherley (of Owen Hatherley and more besides) prompted me to finish the sentences and hit ‘publish’. At the time, a copy of ‘Nairn’s London’ was relatively hard to find – now you should be able to find the reissue.)

The Economist’s Christmas special (2009) had an fascinating article about being an outsider, an emigrant, a foreigner, and the role and practice of writing in terms of understanding the nature of a place. The article described the effect on perception that ‘being a foreigner’ may have:

“Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.” [‘The Others’, The Economist, December 17th 2009]

Unrelated to this, Owen Hatherley and I had a very brief email correspondence a while ago about whether one could capture the essence of a city — or perhaps an essence of the city — in a brief visit, as with his research-fuelled excursions for Building Design (which are turning into a kind of retrofitted Pevsner for the 21stC) or my own scribbles garnered from a mere 24 hours in Geneva or Seoul, or 48 hours in Seattle or Turin or Milan, or a few days in Boston/Cambridge, or several intermittent weekends in Barcelona, and so on.

Can you detect and describe an essence of place from a brief visit? I’ll leave it to you to decide, though I think that—with practice, and research—you can indeed quickly conjure an essence of a city, which may even be a decent facsimile of how many people perceive the place.

Ian Nairn’s book Nairn’s London is quite the opposite. It is a rich book derived from a life spent amidst the city, a city which he clearly worshipped even as it was changing around him. It’s the ultimate inside job. And although written from the point-of-view of the insider, I’d argue it manages to transform the “banality of the everyday” into a “super-real, evocative, true biography” of a city, too.

It’s also a great blueprint of exactly the kind of architecture and urbanism writing we need more of.

He was not an architect—which is key I think—but understood architecture deeply, it seems to me (though I’m also not an architect). The depth and breadth of his research is clear, and if worn on the sleeve, it’s artfully done. He is able to write about both medieval London and modernism with fairness, elan, insight, and a wicked sense of humour. He teases the reader—particularly the relatively closeted reader of 1966, when this book was first published—with saucy metaphors delivered at the altar. He is even-handed in his demolition of poor work in all styles. It’s accessible without ever being lightweight. He writes about urban spaces as well as buildings, about infrastructure and urban strategy, about the city as seen from flowing traffic as well from within a moment of repose standing alone in a quiet, misty, South London common.

One of the more progressive aspects is his indifference to boundaries, disciplines and objectivity. From his preface:

“This guide is simply my personal list of the best things in London … What I am after is character, or personality, or essence … (T)he book has no barriers. I just don’t believe in the difference between high- and low-brow, between aristocracy and working class, between fine art and fine engineering. All are tilting-horses erected by paper men because they can’t or daren’t recognise the golden thread of true quality. This book is a record of what has moved me, between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.”

As an ex-Londoner living in Sydney in 2009, invariably reading it from the back of a light rail tram cutting through a carefully-landscaped harbourside ‘idyll’ punctuated with overweight joggers and gargantuan fig trees laden with screeching cockatoos, it’s an extraordinary experience to be transported back 10000 miles and 40-odd years. Back to a heady brew of smoky chimneys leaving a layer of grime on heavy brick and Portland stone, noisy saloon bars with lairy blokes eyeing birds of a different kind, picking out deals on unreliable mot-ahs in the Evenin Stannad classifieds, and the white-heated whirl of New Town-building and L.C.C.-led flat building (with Archigram lurking within the belly of that L.C.C. architect’s department), all just before the likes of Rogers, Foster, Lasdun, Alsop, Arup, Macormac et al emerge in the wake of Stirling, Cedric and the Smithsons.