The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Simon Heffer Hinterland
The great Ian Nairn was a champion of brutalism, but even he couldn’t save it from the English rain
In an act of enlightenment, Notting Hill Editions recently republished Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London. When it was first published in 1964 by London Transport, it was available to purchase from vending machines at Tube stations. Vandalism meant this civilising enterprise did not survive. Luckily, Nairn’s survey of 260 buildings has. It quickly sold 10,000 copies, thanks to his perceptive criticism, deployed to persuade readers that the alarming modern buildings rising from the bomb sites in the City and West End had some merit.
He had an arresting turn of phrase. Of the Elephant and Castle,
then still a work in progress, he says that “all of it looks as though architecture is a Deadly Serious Business; it has no give or bounce”. Of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture The Rush of Green, at Bowater House in Knightsbridge (a building finished in 1958 then demolished, after a lifetime of disparagement, in 2006), Nairn said it “looks like an incestuous family fleeing into Hyde Park from the vice squad”. He had a deep sense of humanity: buildings were not just for people to work and live in, but to live with.
Nairn was a remarkable, and tragic, man. In his early writing, he attacked the soullessness of suburban building, which was robbing
British towns of their distinctiveness from each other. He coined the term “subtopia” to describe it. Not all of his judgments were shared: the Bull Ring centre in Birmingham, which he praised, became widely loathed, and was pulled down at the turn of the century.
Nairn himself seems to have seen what was coming. Some of the modern buildings he describes in London were already looking grim in the early 1960s, only a few years after being built. Béton brut – the raw concrete that gave brutalism its name – did not stand up well to the English climate, with its rain and frost, and became stained and deeply unappealing: and that was irrespective of some of the designs, which many people found ugly.
The book starts with Owen Campbell-Jones’s Bucklersbury House, in Queen Victoria Street, which Nairn commends for its “freedom from pointlessly applied period detail, freedom from obvious gracelessness, freedom from aesthetic megalomania”. Finished in 1958, this great advertisement for glass and concrete modernity was demolished in 2010: it is no longer there as a yardstick by which we can measure Nairn’s critical soundness.
Gone, too, is Peter Robinson’s in the Strand, finished in 1959, which Nairn calls “a special building”, designed by Denys Lasdun, but which one remembers (it was demolished in the 1990s) became shabby and like a rotten tooth in a street of admittedly mixed fortunes. Most of the central London buildings Nairn describes do survive, so we can take our own view of his taste. He was not far out when he called the Stockwell Bus Garage (1952), with its curved concrete roof, “probably the noblest modern building in London”.
Nairn was a heavy drinker and died of cirrhosis, his alcoholism apparently spurred on by a sense of failure, just before his 53rd birthday. Certainly, he was underappreciated, but failure he was not.