Modern Buildings in London
By Ian Nairn. Introduced by Travis Elborough
£16.99 Notting Hill Editions
Reviewed for c20, the magazine of the Twentieth Century Society
This new edition of Modern Buildings in London, introduced by author Travis Elborough, is the latest Ian Nairn classic to be given a hardback makeover by Notting Hill Editions.
Following in the footsteps of Nairn’s Towns and Nairn’s Paris comes this zesty guidebook, first published in 1964 for London Transport. Back then it could be purchased from automatic book vending machines at inner London stations, an architectural guidebook for the masses, or as Nairn described it, written ‘by a layman for laymen’.
For someone who already owns one of those vintage copies, the additional joy of this new edition comes from Elborough’s informative and entertaining foreword. He delivers valuable insight into the book’s political, social and cultural contexts; it was published at the forward-looking moment of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of technology. As such, the majority of Nairn’s opinions are optimistic about what the future might bring, says Elborough. ‘Or definitely far more hopeful than much of Nairn’s subsequent output’. Here we find Nairn in upbeat form, praising the Vickers Tower as a ‘noble thing’, the Royal Festival Hall as ‘extraordinary’ and Owen Luder’s infamous Eros House in Catford as possessing ‘the same kind of panache as an Elizabethan House’.
The book makes both a fascinating gazetteer and trip down memory lane, although the modern reader might be bemused by the inclusion of such far flung places as Guildford and Crawley. This scope was defined by the geographical limits of the London Transport system; the book was published to encourage leisure travel at a time when revenues were threatened by rising car ownership and the migration of people out of the city.
Divided into regions, the book allows the contemporary reader to indulge in the ghoulish pastime of searching on Google Street View to see if the building survives, or for the more energetic, to walk the city and see for yourself. Discovering those that remain – especially in the much-transformed central areas – provokes a frisson of satisfaction that something good and modern hasn’t met the wrecking ball. As Elborough explains, some sites have been redeveloped several times since the book was published.
Nairn’s prose is typically virtuoso, ‘studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham’, Elborough writes. Nairn’s punchy style is praised, with ‘sentences that almost appear to jump start, as if landing halfway through’. There is an absence of any excess ‘preamble or padding’ which means Nairn’s writing remains fresh and arresting today.
Published in the year that the Post Office Tower was completed, the book reveals a London that was only part-way through the epic task of post-war reconstruction. ‘London was in many respects a far more parochial place back then,’ says Elborough. Indeed Nairn expresses shame that the only building in the book by a ‘foreign architect of international reputation’ is the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which he describes as ‘one of the biggest disappointments in London’. Sadly we never got the Mies or Le Corbusier buildings that Nairn yearned for (although a Mies tower was famously proposed for No 1 Poultry). It makes you wonder what Nairn would make of today’s high-rise global megacity.