Nairn's London

Ian Nairn was a pugnacious and iconoclastic architecture writer whose outspoken critique of banal postwar city planning, Outrage, first propelled him to fame. Nairn's London, written a decade later, was his idiosyncratic, highly personal love letter to the London and its buildings, 'a record of what has moved me,' as he put it, 'between Uxbridge and Dagenham', from well-known monuments such as Westminster Abbey to railway stations, synagogues, a timber merchants, a gas board building and 27 different pubs. Admired by architectural critics such as Jonathan Meades and Owen Hatherley, celebrated in a recent BBC4 documentary and biography, Ian Nairn is now being rediscovered as a singular and hugely influential writer about our surroundings.