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First published by Penguin Books 1966
This edition published with a new Afterword 2014
Copyright © The Estate of Ian Nairn, 2014
Afterword © Gavin Stamp, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Original front cover design by Michael Norris
Cover photograph by Dennis Rolfe
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-39616-3
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 City of London
HIGH ROAD: ST PAUL’S TO ALDGATE
LOW ROAD: BLACKFRIARS TO THE TOWER
CITY: NORTHERN AND WESTERN EDGES
2 Westminster
WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
SOUTH FROM THE ABBEY: VICTORIA AND PIMLICO
WHITEHALL AND ST JAMES’S
TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO SOHO
PICCADILLY AND THE WEST END
CHARING CROSS TO FLEET STREET
3 The Northern Ring: Paddington to Finsbury
PADDINGTON
MARYLEBONE
AROUND REGENT’S PARK
AROUND ST PANCRAS
HOLBORN AND BLOOMSBURY
4 South Bank
5 Kensington-and-Chelsea
BELGRAVIA AND SOUTH KENSINGTON
KENSINGTON
CHELSEA AND WEST KENSINGTON
6 Thames-Side West: Putney to Staines
SOUTH SIDE: PUTNEY TO KINGSTON
NORTH SIDE: FULHAM TO TWICKENHAM
HAMPTON COURT AND BEYOND
7 East End and East London: Whitechapel to Romford
EAST END
NORTH-EAST LONDON
STRATFORD TO UPMINSTER
8 Thames-Side East: Deptford to Dagenham
SOUTH SIDE
NORTH SIDE
9 South London: Battersea to Bromley
BATTERSEA TO PECKHAM AND DULWICH
WANDSWORTH AND ROEHAMPTON
EPSOM – CROYDON – BROMLEY – ELTHAM
10 North London: Hampstead to Watford
HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
NORTH-WEST LONDON
BARNET AND ENFIELD
11 West London: Kensal Green to London Airport
BEYOND PADDINGTON AND KENSINGTON
AROUND UXBRIDGE AND LONDON AIRPORT
Postscript: London Beer
Afterword
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‘Nairn’s London belongs to no genre save its own, it is of a school of one. The masterwork … There is barely a page which does not contain some startling turn of phrase’ Jonathan Meades
‘He taught us how to look’ Deyan Sudjic
‘Once you discover him, which in my case was through my dad’s copy of Nairn’s London, you want to read everything he’s written … He was a literary romantic, with a poetic sensibility’ Andrew M. Brown, Daily Telegraph
‘His attacks on the banality of Britain’s postwar buildings made Ian Nairn an inspiration for a generation of architectural critics’ Jonathan Glancey, Guardian
‘He could see beauty where others just saw dirt, chaos and decay. He delighted in the obscure … it took me to wonderful buildings and unusual places I probably would not otherwise have discovered. Everything he wrote is worth rereading. During his short, furious, productive career, Ian Nairn had a more beneficial effect on the face of Britain than any other architectural writer of his time … a great and hugely rewarding book’ Gavin Stamp
‘Ian Nairn taught me and a lot of us to look at the world’ David Thomson
‘Arguably the finest architectural writer of the twentieth century … vivid, sensual descriptions of buildings, a way of writing about architecture that I’d never imagined possible before … his masterpiece … a work of architectural criticism and architectural history of huge sophistication and erudition, a rum, bawdy and drunken dance up a back alley, a hymn to those rare moments where the individual and the collective meet’ Owen Hatherley
‘One of the best and oddest guidebooks to any city ever written’ Simon Bradley, Evening Standard
‘He had the gift of the potent image, making buildings and places animate or human … anyone who cares even slightly about their surroundings should be intensely grateful … His common themes are a passion for character, distinctiveness, contrast and surprise, for the unselfconscious and the visceral, and a matching loathing for the statistical, the phoney, the cold, the tepid, the routine, the indifferent and for what he called the “prettification” of places … His approach was personal and visual, to capture emotional reactions in front of buildings, and record them with literate beauty’ Rowan Moore, Observer
To John Nash,
who provided so much of the material,
and to Tony Godwin,
who gave me the chance to write about it
The photographs for illustrations 1, 2, 3, 22, and 23 are by W. J. Toomey; those for illustrations 8 and 9 are by Eric de Maré and we thank the Gordon Fraser Gallery for permission to reproduce them; all other photographs are by the author.
Numbers in square brackets in the text refer to the illustrations.
This guide is simply my personal list of the best things in London. I have all the time tried to be rigorous – not any old Wren church or view or pub, but the good ones – and I have all the time tried to get behind conventional aesthetics to an internal reality of which beauty is only one facet. What I am after is character, or personality, or essence.
Whether this grandiose programme has achieved anything more than a collection of subjective maunderings, I am not sure. Too often words which seemed appropriate in the heat of the moment turn out to be trite clichés. Too often my perceptions have been blunted by the fact that I have lived in London for ten years, looking hard at buildings all the time. It is sometimes hard to recapture from the consciousness the first delight in a building which you may have seen a hundred times. There are bound to be too many superlatives, and too many of the same superlatives: I can only plead with the reader to regard this as an anthology and treat each embarrassing rapture as complete in itself.
The guide goes up to the edge of the built-up area – a little further all round than the Greater London Council – and contains about four hundred and fifty entries. This is an astonishing number. In spite of everything, London contains many more and more varied masterpieces than Rome or Paris, just as the National Gallery can produce more and more varied excitements than the Louvre or the Vatican galleries. Nothing will ever quite fit to the accepted waves of Continental influence; and the true Londoner will never quite fit in any pattern at all, even an English one.
The book is organized into what seemed to be common-sense areas. Within them, the order does indicate a route of a sort; but this is not intended to be a package tour. The references are to London A to Z and one-inch ordnance survey maps sheets 160, 161, 169, 170, and 171; the survey references are indicated thus: O.S.; all others are A to Z. The topographical clues are all straightforwardly keyed in to them, though they may take a little looking for – that is part of the game. I have always tried to give modern buildings the benefit of the doubt, and I have always been more responsive to townscape than to individual buildings. A few buildings and places, such as the Royal Festival Hall, which could hardly be left out but seemed to me to be not living up to their reputation, have gone into square brackets.
Everything in the book is accessible. Locked churches are out unless the keys are freely given. The vicar’s wife of one Middlesex church (not in the guide) refused to let me in even after I had explained my harmless purpose: ‘The plausible ones are always the worst,’ she said. This kind of experience is subhuman, and I have no wish to subject readers to it.* Private property is respected unless the owner regularly opens his house to the public – there are some superb eighteenth-century interiors in the West End, but they are highly inaccessible. However, public authorities, where they own a town or country house, I have considered fair game, for they are our servants as well as our masters. Outstanding works of art are mentioned in houses and the smaller galleries. But the masterpieces in the four main collections (National Gallery, Tate, British Museum, Victoria & Albert) would fill a book on their own, and I have not tried to describe them. On the other hand, the best monuments in Westminster Abbey, which is almost a national sculpture gallery, are described in detail. A list at the end of the book groups places and buildings by date and type for those who want to specialize.
This, quite obviously, is not a normal guide and is not trying to be one. If you want straightforward general information, the best bet is probably the Blue Guide. For architectural information, there is nothing to beat The Buildings of England; in writing this book I personally have been very glad that the series covers almost all of the area, with only Kent to come.
Finally, as the objects selected will make quite clear, the book has no barriers. I just don’t believe in the difference between high- and lowbrow, 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 recognize 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.
There are four hundred and fifty entries here: between them they define Europe’s biggest city. And that is the only way to do it, because London as a single personality simply does not exist. It never has, at least from the moment when Edward the Confessor built his abbey on the marshes a couple of miles away from the original, homogeneous commercial city. All the attributes of the capital have piled on to this shallow basin of gravel like rugby players in a scrum, kicking and elbowing each other out of the way. And now with the pace of building hotted up and all the second-degree consequences working themselves out – the flood of the office workers is one, the flood of tourists is another – Central London has disintegrated. Units like the City or Fleet Street may still mean something, but by pushing out all the quiet, human places the planners and speculators have removed the only mortar which could bind them together. London is indeed a thousand villages; remove them and all that is left is a vast hulk peppered with spectacular buildings, quaint occasions, false sophistication and too many people in the Underground.
If there is a generalized sense of the capital – bright lights, red buses, swirling traffic – it is almost entirely due to the genius of John Nash, who in Regent Street gave the West End a trunk around which it could grow. Nash came from Lambeth, and he was every inch a cockney: tolerant, shrewd, cheerfully vulgar and with a remarkable eye for quick profit. Here in fact is the real basis for a coherent city – that is, its people. And a splendid, easy-going place they could make it too: a blend of Paris and Copenhagen. But everywhere the cockneys are pushed out and the cockney streets are pulled down – often with the best of sociological intentions. Just as topographical London is a vast twenty-mile saucer of people with a rim of low hills, so human London is a central goulash with its rightful inhabitants forming an unfashionable rim. The human essence of the city is now in places which are often nothing to look at: Brentford, Mitcham, Charlton, Tottenham, Plaistow, West Ham, Wembley. The old contract which bound clubman, chorus-girl and costermonger together to form a city has been torn up, and London has moved into a limbo in which professional and social contacts are scarifying and even the ordinary street contact is becoming unsympathetic. We are not yet on an American level of city-street unfriendliness, but this is only just around the corner.
My forecast may be too pessimistic: I hope so. I have lived in London for ten years and perhaps I am punch-drunk from pompous phrases in the City and neighing banalities in Chelsea. Certainly, one evening in a good cockney pub and the whole preposterous bunch of unspeakables floats off down the Thames to the Northern Outfall Sewer. But what London desperately needs is a new Nash, a person with stature enough to see the city as a whole and humanity enough to see that it cannot possibly rediscover itself through grand gestures and centralization, but only through a multiplication of idiosyncratic and wildly different characters. Long live the thousand villages; long live the tolerant cockney spirit that allows them to coexist. London burnt in 1940 for the sake of tolerance, and the price was well worth it. It is burning again, but this time only to satisfy developers’ greed, planners’ inadequacy and official stupidity. We must put out the fires and start healing this great place with the love and understanding it needs. It is already three parts gone; for God’s sake let us leave the rest alone, and help to make the city whole again.