The Man Who Fought the Planners: The Story of Ian Nairn

In 1956, a gauche young man appeared on BBC television

to warn us about the soulless destruction of Britain

by post-war planners.

Subtopia in a nutshell means making the same

sort of mess of the whole of the countryside

we've already made of the edges of our towns.

Over the next two decades,

the gauche young man turned into an angrier, older one.

I'm a travelling man. I see most of Britain in the course of a year.

I'm always amazed at the way

people would try to put words all over the landscape.

I suppose the epitome is the pile of grit on the side of a road,

the pole sticking up out of it and then the word "grit".

What do they think it is, passion fruit?!

Travelling all over the country to report on the places that

moved him most, Ian Nairn's appearances on television

were by turns passionate...

I've used a lot of superlatives about Newcastle.

Yet each time, when I see it for the first time coming over the Tyne,

the whole excitement of the place gets me

just as though it was the first time I'd ever seen it.

..angry and indignant...

This isn't a beer festival, it's a convulsion.

They'll probably get through more alcohol in a week

than most of those bastards get through in a year!

..pleading...

If you've got a view as splendid as this, please don't build houses

like those over there, because a view is a two-way responsibility.

..and, towards the end of his tragically short life,

full of disappointment and quiet despair.

Bolton. St Saviour, Deane Road, and one of their noblest churches.

And now look at it!

Pews flattened.

I don't quite know how you would characterise

the vandalism of the yobbos who did this.

But, though he might have felt the battle to save Britain's soul

was beyond him, and saw out his days through a glass, darkly,

Nairn inspired a new generation to take up arms against the second-rate

and did perhaps more than anybody

to make us look afresh at the world around us.

Flying, not architecture, was Ian Nairn's first love.

As a young boy growing up in the Home Counties,

he'd hang around the airfields, cadging rides off pilots and

dreaming of the day he could take to the skies as a pilot himself.

That day came in 1950, when, having scraped through

a maths degree at Birmingham University, he joined the RAF.

And flying his Gloster Meteor jet over the countryside

was to provide Flight Officer Nairn with

a unique perspective on Britain.

His love of flying gave him

this aerial perspective, the singular perspective a pilot has.

You look down from this detached height with a rather cold eye

on the landscape below you, but you see it very clearly.

Here is the mess they've made of the following towns.

You can see the towns stretching out

with their tentacles of junk housing everywhere.

From flying, he could already see what was happening

to this idea that the town was no longer the town

and the country no longer the country,

that they were melding together in an uncontrollable way,

and it was that overhead view that drove his first campaign.

In 1954, Nairn's life took an abrupt turn.

Determined to do something about the mess

he had witnessed from the air, he resigned his commission from

the RAF and joined the ranks of an altogether different establishment.

The Architectural Review was the country's leading

campaigning journal on architecture and design,

that only employed the elite of the profession.

But though he had no architectural qualifications to his name

Ian Nairn was undeterred.

He doorstepped the architectural press.

I think he was a tidal wave, he just...

He sent in material, he bombarded everyone with letters,

he turned up on the doorstep, in their very elegant premises just

round the corner from Westminster Abbey, Queen Anne's Gate,

this very young, very gauche, very, very passionate person,

and Hubert de Cronin Hastings, the extraordinarily eccentric

editor/proprietor, saw he'd got something quite special here.

It was through the seemingly genteel auspices

of the Architectural Review

that Nairn was to drop his bombshell on the rarefied

and rather self-satisfied world of British architecture.

Outrage was his deadly weapon.

Published as a special edition of the Review in June 1955,

its impact was incendiary.

Outrage was just saying something that had

absolutely not been said in that form.

I mean, before the war there was a lot of campaign

about the spread of suburbia but nothing like this.

Many people have said that, you know, the Luftwaffe did less damage

to British cities in the Second World War

than post-war planners did

in the first 20 years after the Second World War.

It's a cheap jibe in many ways, of course,

but there is a lot of truth to it!

Ian just drew it all together and said, why did planners, architects,

politicians, why did they do this to the British landscape?

Why did they concrete over it?

Why did they knock down historic towns?

Why are we damning Britain to a kind of visual hell?

Outrage was based on a car journey Nairn took from Southampton

to Carlisle, gathering photographic evidence along the way.

These were not photographs of loveliness,

these were photographs of grimness, awful photographs.

Hideous lamp standards, wirescape,

undisguised industrial buildings, endless sprawl of little houses.

It's like a stamp album full of horrible photographs.

NAIRN: Before I started on that journey I made a prophecy, which was

the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle.

Well, here is the end of Southampton

and here really is the beginning of Carlisle.

That's the thing in a nutshell.

They're both the same and they're neither worth looking at.

These days, opinionated journalists are two a penny.

But back in the 1950s Nairn was seen as a radical,

in tune with a rising chorus of Angry Young Men.

Ian is the architectural, er, member

of the club of Angry Young Men.

You know, there were the films,

there were the plays, Look Back In Anger,

there were the books, Room At The Top,

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

and there was Ian writing Outrage.

I think Nairn was part of a generation

who were bolshie as a matter of pride.

They liked, erm, sticking a finger up to virtually everyone.

Ian Nairn's able to write a bombshell, which Outrage was,

because he didn't really have any...

he didn't have any favours to pay back, he didn't have any...

He wasn't an Establishment figure, he didn't have to tread carefully,

he could be as rude as he wanted, he could be as frank.

It's really rebarbative stuff.

With Outrage, Nairn became an overnight sensation.

And the BBC was first in line to get the man of the moment

into their studios to explain an intriguing new term he'd coined.

They call it Subtopia, and here's Ian Nairn

of the Architectural Review, who coined that word.

Subtopia in a nutshell means making the same

sort of mess of the whole of the countryside

we've already made of the edges of our towns.

I compounded the word out of suburb and utopia.

The term quickly became a national talking point.

-NEWSREEL:

-Now, there's no denying that the new property isn't

built in the style of the rest of the village.

But is it any worse for that?

Is it an asset to the village or just another piece of Subtopia?

And there was even a travelling exhibition to warn people

up and down the country about the dangers of Subtopia.

Every house we build changes the appearance of the surroundings

in which we live.

And nobody would choose to live in ugly surroundings.

Encouraged by the amount of press attention generated by Outrage,

Nairn followed up a year later with Counter-Attack,

a rousing call to arms

and an attempt to galvanise the general public into action.

He started to write pieces which came from something called

the Counter-Attack Bureau.

Now, the Counter-Attack Bureau in all reality was his desk.

But the point was that people were encouraged to start waking up

to their own responsibilities, people saying, you know,

this corner of our town is too grim to go on like this.

What, Councillor Bloggs, are you going to do about this?

Nairn was writing for people.

You know, have you seen something horrible? Send us a picture of it.

Tell us where it is.

You know, it's like sort of saying, you know, tweet us your response.

It's absolutely extraordinary. And of course people did,

and then they had sackfuls of stuff coming in.

Faced with this rising tide of public protest,

the government had no choice but to act.

In 1957, Duncan Sandys,

the Housing Minister in Harold Macmillan's

Conservative government, launched The Civic Trust.

Its remit was to financially support local communities in tackling

the Subtopian eyesores that Nairn had so graphically exposed.

Nairn was asked to join the Trust, but refused.

People read it and thought, we must do something, you know.

But Ian himself could never organise anything, he was utterly...

He was not just anti-bureaucratic,

he was himself utterly un-bureaucratic.

One of the great things about this man was that he was not a joiner.

He would not do anything at anyone's bidding.

He liked to keep his distance.

And also he realised that the...

greatest corruption is friendship, much more than money.

You know, acquaintanceship, which goes into friendship, and so

you can't really say what you mean, so, yeah, he kept his distance.

Ian was a libertarian.

He, erm, wanted people to express themselves,

people of all kinds to express themselves.

But he found it quite difficult to communicate in person.

He was so shy, so diffident, so self-deprecating,

so uncomfortable, awkward.

But, though he found it hard to connect with people

in his professional life, Nairn was twice married.

After a short-lived first marriage, he met Judy Perry,

who shared his intense love of buildings

and was prepared to give him the freedom he needed in a marriage.

She was working as a copy editor at Penguin on The Buildings Of England,

the exhaustive catalogue of the nation's best buildings,

compiled by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner.

-NEWSREEL:

-At Penguin's, the book is assembled by Judy Nairn - layout,

illustrations, design, indexes, references, details.

Well, I can remember the first time I met her,

because I was working in Bloomsbury Square,

just round the corner from here, where Pevsner had his office.

She was good fun but she didn't take time to talk

when she should have been working.

This is how I remember Judy.

I think that's in her office,

with her Tippex and her... her Players!

Awful Players!

Oh, and Ian next to a plane, looking young and windswept.

I do remember Judy having a photo on her desk

and it may have been this photo.

It's the sort of thing she'd have liked, because it's sort of, erm...

He looks roguish, and that would have appealed to her.

She spent, as far as I know, all her time with him

when she wasn't at work.

She was incredibly loyal and I think probably they shared

confidences that they probably didn't share with anyone else.

New beginnings with Judy

signalled a new chapter in Nairn's professional life.

In 1962, he left the Architectural Review

to become a freelance journalist and writer

and soon after embarked on a work

which many acknowledge as his masterpiece.

Nairn's London is one of the great, great books about London,

without any question. I mean, it's a wonderful piece of writing.

The writing is much, much more interesting

than the buildings that are described in it.

And...I think this is very important.

He shouldn't be thought of as some kind of architectural guide,

he should be thought of as a poet of place.

He had a nose, you know,

for hunting down amazing places, amazing buildings

and then conveying what was wonderful about them

in an extraordinarily vivid way.

When it was published in 1966, Nairn's London quickly became

a bible for a new generation of architecture lovers.

In the early '60s I made my first visit to London

and, priced 8/6, this was my first bible to discovering London.

"The way to come on St Paul's is along Fleet Street,

"and the way to go along Fleet Street is on top of a bus.

"That way, the dip down to Ludgate Circus and up again seems sharper.

"The railway viaduct, ugly in itself,

"does the same thing as the Ludgate, which stood on the site.

"It provides a check to the eye,

"indicating that the city centre is beyond.

"Whether the view would be better without it is a nice point.

"Probably it would, because the sight of St Paul's at the end

"is so grand that nothing should blur it."

This was the book which gave you that rather unusual take

on whatever it was you were seeing.

It was infused with passion, a passion which I already had

but needed directing, and this was a book which sort of helped to channel

that passion into understanding what it was I was looking at.

The appeal of Nairn's London has endured,

picking up other admiring passengers along the way.

The book is of course an amazing idiosyncratic insight

into one man's view.

I really love the cover and we can read a lot into it, you know,

Nairn as bus driver is telling you something about the man.

You know, he wants to identify with the kind of people

who are bus drivers, you know, ordinary occupation.

His preface, too, where he says,

"This guide is simply my personal list of the best things in London.

"The objects selected will make clear that 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.

"My book is a record of what has moved me

"between Uxbridge and Dagenham.

"My hope is that it moves you too."

For someone of my generation,

who was brought up in a world of post-modernism, where the gaps

between low and high culture are not so evident, you know,

Nairn seems to be a kind of seer.

He re-read, if you like, bits of the city that had

dropped off the radar of mainstream architectural criticism.

You know, the pub is just as valuable as the church.

I mean, for me, that just spoke volumes.

Clearly there's a bias in the book

towards the buildings of the past,

and probably 100 years before he was writing,

that's the stuff he seems to enjoy the most,

but he's extremely kind of incisive about modern architecture.

"The Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore,

"by HT Cadbury-Brown, 1961.

"This is a very good place to feel the husky,

"direct temper of young British architects.

"It is the opposite of a firework.

"It smoulders through to your consciousness

"with a quiet intensity.

"Seven storeys of classrooms, the staircase coming where it needs to,

"a lecture theatre on the ground floor,

"and bolshie paired roof lights on top

"nudging the sky along with the Boeings and Caravelles."

A building like the Royal College of Art,

you know, his description of it is so fantastic.

He talks about it as if it were almost a kind of, you know,

working-class, proletarian gesture in a place like South Kensington

which is full of sort of rather stuffy Edwardian high culture.

And he frames it in a way that would have been really familiar to

a class-conscious reader in the '60s.

"Purple brick and concrete aggregate,

"humped up against the Albert Hall like a gruff egalitarian greeting.

"All if it done with feeling for the students.

"All of it is troubled, asking, questioning, scrutinising."

By the mid-'60s,

the London skyline was facing a revolution of its own.

High-rise blocks were fast filling the holes

left by the slum clearances of the Blitz.

And as modernist buildings shot up

Nairn looked on with cautious optimism.

As a young man Ian had been thrilled by modern architecture.

It was seen as part of the student revolution in social life.

Everything was going to change, everything was going to be better.

And as he started to watch new buildings going up in England

and Britain he thought, oh, dear, they're not very good, are they?

In fact, some of them are second-rate, some just dreadful.

And if you combine the buildings with the planning,

with the way towns are laid out, my God, this just awful stuff...

We're actually making things worse.

He watched with, I think, initially vague disappointment,

then incredulity, then absolute anger at what was happening.

Great historic buildings were being demolished,

the Euston Arch famously, the Coal Exchange in the City of London.

These were wonderful things.

Georgian terraces were being knocked down as if they were

skittles in a bowling alley, it was dreadful, dreadful stuff.

By 1964, Nairn had become the Observer's architecture critic

and used his position to fight back

at the havoc being wreaked on his beloved London.

Ian wrote a very powerful piece in the Observer,

great big long piece, really saying everything he wanted to

about what was wrong with modern architecture and town planning.

And basically he says, mostly he says,

it's the fault of the architects, because they can't do things right,

they can't build properly, they don't understand materials,

they don't understand landscape, they're not very subtle.

Their education's wrong, they're a load of toffs basically.

They're remote from society... God, he goes on and on.

It's bloody good, actually, it's a rattling good read over 3,000 words.

With opinionated articles like this,

Nairn was once more making waves - and it was only a matter of time

before the BBC came looking for him again.

I read his pieces and I was very...

Not so much impressed by them as startled, really.

It was a unique voice, I felt,

looking at the way Britain was, its landscape and its society.

And I decided that I'd like to do a television series with him.

With his first series for the BBC, Nairn had the opportunity

to broaden his scope and report on the massive redevelopment changes

affecting cities all over Britain.

First on his itinerary was Bradford.

After the war, the city decided to rebuild, and on a scale which is

without parallel except in the Blitz towns of Britain.

It was a deliberate act of recreation

and a very adventurous thing to do.

Has it succeeded?

Meself, I don't think so, and I want to try and show you why.

He wasn't a natural performer, but there was something about

the force of his words and his passion that broke through that.

This is Horton Old Hall, 17th-century and stone-built.

If it was in the Cotswolds it would be beautifully kept up,

people would come 50 miles to see it,

but it's in Bradford, and look at it.

It makes me burn, this throwing away of every vestige of the past.

Although people liked to claim him as one,

Nairn was never simply a conservationist.

For him, the essential quality of buildings lay in how they

shaped people's lives rather than in any innate architectural value.

And he saw evidence of that quality in the most unexpected of places.

Wigan is an absolutely typical Ian Nairn target town.

He likes places that are being done down, so he likes the northern towns

and he's particularly like to defend them if they're being done down.

Wigan Pier is the one thing that everybody knows about Wigan.

It's the butt of a thousand musical jokes

and it was in the title of George Orwell's

famous book on social conditions in the 1930s.

It makes handy copy as a journalist might say, but it also makes a handy excuse

for not going to see what the real Wigan is,

and whether it's changed in 30 years, whether it ever was like that.

Londoners who don't come up here still tend to think that savages start north of Barnet.

So as a kind of Southerner's apology for what the south has thought of Wigan for too long,

I'd like to show you some of the things I like about it.

The point about Wigan, he says there's a richness to it and he likes the scale of it.

And he like the common sense of the place and the people.

Common Sense, well I think the best example of that is the main street itself,

not too long, not too wide, all the shops there.

Common sense again, down in this little alley, which is really like

a very long outdoor room.

All the little shops open on to it.

There's one, there's two, there's three for a half a crown.

Ian Nairn is crazy about markets and he likes the chat.

In the film there's one particular salesman and he's built like a rugby league forward.

If you went to London, China or Hong Kong, you wouldn't get them any cheaper than that...

Nairn really revels in that sort of thing.

And he likes markets, partly because they're companionable,

but also because they're spontaneous.

That spontaneity and easiness and informality

which is what he really enjoys about these places.

Who'll give me three and 11 for that? It retails in the chemist, any shop you want to go to

seven and five, it's a seven and five size.

Ian could see the beauty underneath the grime.

I mean, those northern city television programmes of his

are very much about alerting people to the beauty underneath the grime.

But not just the beauty of the buildings,

but the beauty of the communities that lived in those buildings.

And it wasn't just old buildings that Nairn felt captured this spirit.

I'm very struck at the end of Ian Nairn's Wigan,

he goes to a pub which is called the Ball And Boot

and you would think he wouldn't like it.

It certainly nothing like the Victorian fairy palaces which he's talked of.

But the pub has something which is more than architecture,

more than chandeliers more than great guilt mirrors,

it's got a pub atmosphere.

There is a friendliness about it, he's a great believer that

a place is valuable as a community rather than as something to look at.

Most modern pubs don't work properly, but this one does.

It's a Lancashire pub, designed by a Lancashire architect, selling Lancashire beer.

and it hasn't tried to ape the Victorian style

but it has got the Victorian qualities.

which is robustness and vitality and above everything else...

..the ability to create spaces which people are happy using.

So if you want a real town, come out from your Hampsteads

and your Wimbledons, come out from your Wirral

and your Wilmslows, come to Wigan.

But Nairn's love of pubs could play havoc with the filming schedule.

I think the main challenge was licensing hours, really.

Ian's day, I can't remember now,

because the pubs are open all the time,

but Ian's day was governed by breaks from 11:30 until 3:00

and then being up again perhaps at seven.

Occasionally we would adjourn to the pub at 11:00 or 11:30.

By the end of the afternoon session, Ian would feel he wanted to

say something quite different to what he'd said in the morning.

Not quite different, but the nuance of it, you know.

-REPORTER:

-Was it any better?

-Rarely.

Despite being a bit of a loose cannon, Nairn's television work was getting noticed.

In 1970, the Central Office of Information poached him from

the BBC to make a promotional film about Pimlico, where he then lived.

I'm a city man, I really enjoy living in cities,

but I also enjoy living on a human scale.

So here in Pimlico in London I'm living in a village,

right in the middle of the biggest city in Europe.

In the film, Nairn talked to people on camera for the first time...

It was a bold new step.

Doctor, how do you feel about this scheme, you must see the rough end of it?

I think it a marvellous idea.

But one that didn't perhaps play to his strengths.

Thanks very much, Doctor, I am delighted it really does work for you as a professional,

but it might make your life much harder.

The curious thing about Ian Nairn was

he wanted to be a man of the people.

But he was so shy and awkward and uncomfortable,

he talks in quite a stilted, artificial way.

It's not relaxed, it's not conversation.

Your most relevant next-door neighbours in this terrace facing the Thames.

Ian was all right at relaxing in the pub

but was not really good talking with you ordinary people, whom he identified with.

Those ordinary people were residents of two pioneering post-war

council estates in Pimlico, which for Nairn had successfully

tackled the issue that exorcised him most.

The thing about Pimlico, the great

thing about it is that there is a mixture of people and incomes.

And it's a mixture that has been deliberately

encouraged by the council.

Churchill Gardens, which started this was good for its time, I don't think it's perfect

but I do think the council have made good some of the mistakes of Churchill Gardens

in the newer estate they are building in Lillington Street.

Here in Lillington Street everything's closed in, integrated

and all the things that were separate ideas in Churchill Gardens are built in here.

for example, there's an old people's home.

Quite a lot of old people, not shunted off idly into a separate building

but actually built into the fabric of Pimlico, living together, not in isolated units.

It was quite a breakthrough in post-war architecture,

this estate and it is an evocation of the working-class community

in which people of all kinds live cheek by jowl.

It's all mixed up, it's got a school, it's got a church

and for Ian, absolutely crucial to community life was the pub.

I'm at my office desk. Or one of them.

This pub is at the bottom of the estate

and I find that in three-quarters of an hour in a pub like this

I can work much better than I can in my home or my office where the

telephone is ringing all the time.

This kind of background buzz of conversation gives a real internal privacy

but it doesn't mean it's indifferent.

There's friendliness there, it's not the...

trumpeted indifference of big cities.

And this for me is exactly what city living, living in Pimlico is.

Somebody said to me who knew Nairn well,

"Although Ian liked the beer,

"in a strange way, he liked the pubs even more."

And the more I reflect on this, the more I think it's probable true.

I mean, he couldn't stop drinking the beer

but he does love the feeling of a pub.

I mean, he obviously, he was...

he had a tremendous weakness for alcohol but he also...

I think that it was more that pubs offered him

a great deal of comfort and home, really.

I mean, Ian was driven by demons and he assuaged them.

Pubs seemed to assuage them for him, really.

And erm, he was at home in a pub

in a way that he wasn't at home anywhere else in the world.

Travelling and being constantly on the move, was another way

Nairn could leave his troubles behind.

This is Ian's passport.

It has a very unflattering passport photograph

but what's really remarkable about it is the number of stamps,

passport, visa entries which come in all shapes and sizes.

It shows you what a compulsive traveller he really was.

It's awe-inspiring.

In 1970, Nairn took to the road for his next BBC series,

Nairn's Europe, which was to take him far from home and provide him

with a much needed tonic.

I remember going to research Nairn's Europe with Ian

and we were driving around Europe in this Morris Minor convertible

and he turned to me at one point and he said,

"Do you know, John, we're actually getting paid for doing this."

And I thought yes it's marvellous. What a marvellous job to have.

Nairn's Europe saw him travelling all over the continent, exploring

the architecture and culture of the cities he loved the most.

And you could be sure with Nairn, it would be no ordinary travel log.

For me, Belgium is the most exciting country in western Europe.

As soon as I cross the frontier from France or Holland or Germany,

odd things start happening.

I suppose the oddest and nicest thing that I ever saw in Belgium

was in a suburb of Brussels.

Where a military band marched smartly up the street,

turned smartly right and played itself into a pub

and here for example, is the only place I've ever seen

cows tethered to a bus stop.

Things like that are going on all the time and they add up to a wonderful

collective portfolio of excitement.

You see, I think, Ian's...

feeling for idiosyncrasy, really,

which comes through again and again.

He see's in circumstances and situations

something so different from what anybody else would have seen

and it highlights them.

You feel you know more about Belgium than you'd

get from a 100 guidebooks, really.

But Nairn's wanderlust and his keen eye for the extraordinary

was all too often accompanied by a roving eye

and another sort of restless wandering altogether.

Ian's dying wish was to die rolling in the arms

of a fat, Walloon tart.

A Walloon being a French speaking Belgian.

And Ian had a particular fondness for Belgian...

-Go on...

-Which says it all really, perfectly.

He had affairs of the heart and affairs of the wallet, I think...

would be one way of putting it.

I remember having a row with him.

A rather serious row with him about using prostitutes but I mean,

that was a sort of.... It was a sort of erm...

He was very much - again, very much what he felt, very much

the demons that were driving him.

That he felt that that's

the sort of solus comfort that he wanted.

He wasn't a happy man at all.

He didn't have any of the sort of

rounded certainties that go with family or kinship.

Nairn's series on Europe promoted him

from a regional to a networked, BBC ONE primetime slot.

He may not have been to everyone's taste

but he was becoming a familiar face on television.

In 1970, Harold Evans -

the recently appointed editor of the Sunday Times -

was on the lookout for exciting new talent and Nairn had caught his eye.

Well, he wanted the best and Ian was.

You know, whatever the category, he wanted the best practitioner

and you know, Ian was.

He was unique and nobody I'd ever met before that

and nobody I've met since worked in the same way as Ian.

I mean, Ian didn't have a type writer, Ian had a notebook

and into that notebook went Ian's text.

And if you asked him to

extend it or shorten it or change it in any way, he couldn't.

Because it was an almost sort of poetic

distillation of what he thought.

And, you know, you might as well have asked him to...

change a line in Paradise Lost or something

as change a line of his own text. He simply couldn't do it.

Well, this is typical.

Not many mistakes in that.

This is a piece he wrote about Wigan in longhand.

Beautifully legible, page after page without even any changes in,

so I just had to sit there and type it.

Mostly he just looked after himself and, you know,

he wasn't like a normal sort of journalist.

He spoke about what happened to be in his head at the time and

if it was unfashionable or,

you know, off the wall a bit, fine.

I think of him as a...

Lots of words beginning with S, really. He was a...

sort of shy, solitary,

sincere,

self-conscious man who spoke senior service.

But at the same time, he could often be so sort of quirky and strange.

He'd pick up the phone and shout,

"Weasel, stote and polecat!"

As if it was some firm of provincial solicitors.

Or another time he'd just bark down the phone, "Woof, woof!"

When he was depressed, he'd pick it up and say,

"This is Chartres Cathedral, south aisle, Death speaking."

Which...

disconcerted the person on the other end, no end.

TRAIN HORN BLARES

Never one to be desk-bound,

Nairn accepted every opportunity to travel.

And in the same year he joined the Sunday Times,

he journeyed north to report for the BBC on a place that was

particularly close to his heart.

I've used a lot of superlatives about Newcastle over the past

ten years or so.

Each time I think, "Oh, it can't be that good,

"I've overstated the case again." And yet each time,

when I see it for the first time coming over the Tyne, the whole

excitement of the place gets me just as though it was

the very first time I'd ever seen it.

Newcastle expressed all sorts of things to Ian Nairn

about who he wanted to be.

He just had this huge desire to be a Northerner

and to be working class, which he wasn't, he was middle class.

But Newcastle was a place where he felt that

he fitted as this person, you could say, he invented.

The great thing about Newcastle is that all the parts are acting

together, all the layers of history are mixed up.

The bridges, the tangled roads and railways, the skyline beyond

and the great chasm, precipitous slopes down to the river below.

This is an essential Nairn view.

The fact that life is interweaving and history has come together,

so we're standing in the medieval.

You know, the new castle.

Which he always pronounced with and "ah"

even though he came from Bedford.

And then the railways come and they're brave and they do it,

you know, with conviction.

When the railways came,

they did what should have been a barbarous thing.

They ran a railway right through the castle between the castle

gatehouse and the main keep.

If you thought about it in the abstract you'd think, what a terrible thing to do,

but it works because now you've got the two levels of Newcastle there at once.

Medieval Newcastle and railway Newcastle.

He looked at the city as somewhere that had just...

each time something new happened, it just took it on the chin.

So you know, when you've got to punch your train lines

through your medieval castle - I mean, whoever did that?

But they did it, they managed it.

And you know, it made a wonderful bit of theatre and there we are.

The train is going through the castle, here we stand.

Isn't that good?

I mean, no city planner would have come up with this wonderful

layer cake of history.

And of course, the irony is that

when the real big city plan came, that's when it went wrong.

And he was very saddened by it.

In the mid 1960s,

the charismatic new leader of Newcastle City Council,

T Dan Smith, had a vision.

To turn Newcastle into a modern Mecca.

But his grand plans for streets in the sky would eventually turn out

to be pie in the he sky.

By the time he makes the film in 1970,

a few strong moves were made to sort of remodel the city

but a lot of it was sort of left halfway,

which in some ways was the worst of both worlds.

The part of Newcastle that most needs something doing to it quickly,

is the area that slopes steeply down to the river.

The part that's got the chairs running through it,

these great sequences of narrow staircases

running between walls.

Formerly running between walls that belong to the houses.

It was already in a bad way...

oh, well before the war.

In about 1960, when they were first talking about revitalising Newcastle

there were still just one or two people clinging on living,

one or two shops. There was a little hairdresser shop on one chair.

But in spite of all the good intentions,

absolutely nothing new has been built here in the last ten years.

There are plans, there are plenty of them,

but nothing has actually gone up.

When he comes to film in 1970, he's looking at a very,

very crumbling old fabric.

So he's looking at the chairs and he's thinking something must...

He's pleading for them.

Well, 1970 wasn't a good time to plead for very old buildings.

There wasn't much strategy for that sort of thing in a brave new world.

I'm sitting in the Royal Arcade in Newcastle. It's another slice

of Granger and Dobson. It was put up with a very formal entrance at the

end of Moseley Street and Pilgrim Street. It never really worked

because it was intended to connect up with more of the town's eastern end

and that never caught on, so it was always a kind of dead end.

It was always in trouble.

And now it is in real trouble because,

look at it!

See, what happened was...

..that...

Newcastle said,

"Fine. The Royal Arcade's got to go.

"We've got to have a roundabout in Pilgrim street

"but we'll take it down carefully, store the stones,

"number them and then put it up again somewhere else."

But not like this!

This is just like a bomb site, it's a bit of slum clearance.

the stones are anyhow, anyone can get at them.

So we've been conned, Newcastle's been conned, I've been conned myself.

I think he thought that things had gone terribly wrong

and that the car had overtaken everything.

The man-hating car, he called it.

The way in which the road system came in and went without

let or hindrance through some of the sites that he loved.

Where the arcade used to be in Pilgrim Street there is a new

office block and a roundabout.

It's meant to be the set piece you see as you

drive across the Tyne into Newcastle.

When you get there, the long journey up and across the Tyne,

you think, urgh.

What was rising, such as Swan House,

and all this complexity of underpasses

and separating people from traffic and nowhere pleasant to walk,

that wasn't what he thought was coming.

I mean, call him naive. In a way, he was.

He wasn't after all an architect or a planner,

he just believed, you know, he believed the best of what they were

aspiring to and what they actually got was definitely not the best.

Despite his general disappointment with modern architecture,

Nairn did occasionally come across new buildings that he felt

were worth celebrating.

This is a multi-storey car park with a difference.

If you think that concrete exposed always has to be mean and messy,

then look at the grand sweep of this.

Strength and also the elegance.

It's a splendid job.

He loved bold statements.

What he hated was the ordinary, the bland, the mediocre.

He liked small buildings, he liked big buildings,

he hated medium sized buildings.

There should be far more buildings like this.

We sometimes go in for odd shapes

but dead serious about them like some of the new university buildings.

This is just having a lark and a good thing too.

He hated the medium rise

and he would say they suck the life out of the environment.

They take everything and they give nothing back.

I love his ability to, you know, pull up the best

and push out the worst.

He goes to Huddersfield and there's just a little boring

little bank on a corner and he gives it sort of...

He just wither it with three words.

Just across from here is a bank - the biggest yawn of all - which has been

constrained into this idle grid.

Oh, come on, you know?

FRENCH TRAIN ANNOUNCER

Quintessential Nairn on television for me, was something a little bit exotic.

Places I hadn't been to as a child.

I like it when he goes off to Germany and Austria and he goes on

the Orient Express and then he gets involved in the he Munich Beer Festival.

This is a man that loved beer more than anything by this time and he's

pushing through the crowd saying, "I think this is all horrific!"

This isn't a beer festival, it's a convulsion.

I hope that most of the people here, are here genuine Munichers,

not just tourists coming to watch a spectacle...

"This is just a load of nonsense, like a punch and Judy show."

That sort of thing. "This is just Disneyland, really."

Or, "It's a ridiculous way of using cities."

and starts pushing people out of the way to talk to the camera

and he's getting really angry on camera.

..because it's disgusting and I'll probably get through more

alcohol in a week than most of those bastards get through in a year!

For Nairn, the function and flavour of a building or a place had

to be genuine. Just like real ale

and anything short of that left him with a bitter taste in his mouth.

Excuse me, mate.

As an expression of a collective, Germanic force, it's fine.

As something which just happens and tourists cash in on it,

it hits me. I hate....

As Nairn continued his whistle-stop tour through seven countries,

his passion for travel was tested to the limit

and the cracks began to show.

Well there it is, the end of the line.

The buffers at Istanbul station.

My impression of the whole journey?

Well, frankly, I'm so physically shattered at the moment,

it's hard to sort them out.

Kind of shock therapy right through Europe, this one.

Punch, punch, punch, out of one place, into another.

And that's about all I can say because, shish, I'm shattered.

I'm going to go for a very long bath and quite a long sleep now.

But there was to be no let-up in his filming schedule

and once back in Britain, Nairn embarked on another

mammoth journey for the BBC.

Nairn Across Britain saw him

retracing the journey he'd taken in 1955 for Outrage.

From London, right up to Carlisle and the Scottish border.

And the Britain he now reported on was a very different place.

When Ian made his TV programmes,

he could see tremendous amounts of destruction all around him.

He would speak in front of, or inside buildings that had been demolished, just about to

be demolished and he would rant and rave quite rightly.

I mean, real vitriol, you don't often see that on television.

I watched his programmes and the one that really moved me

quite a lot was when he went to Northampton.

And Northampton has a very good market square

and in the corner of the market there's an arcade.

And he said, "This arcade is not an architectural masterpiece

"but it's a really... It's something that works.

"It's something that people are happy in and it is threatened."

It's a bit difficult to talk about the arcade at the moment,

because by the time the programme goes out,

its fate will probably have been decided.

So if this turns out to be an obituary I am very sorry

and meanwhile here's the reason's

given by the council for demolishing it.

First, the success of the new scheme depends on running a service

road at roof level through this place.

Well, my answer to that is, change the scheme.

Number two, the arcade has no real architectural value.

No architectural value?!

With this great cupola here and the balconies

and the arches down there? Arches with a perspective effect

because this arcade is on a quite a considerable hill

and that in my experience - which with respect is rather larger than

that of Northampton councillors - is architecturally unique.

If they really do pull this place down, it'll be a diabolical shame.

He really made you feel it was a very important thing that this

building should not be demolished and this was a repeat.

And just as he finished almost tearfully saying how important

it was, a little caption went out saying this building was demolished.

And you really thought, "Gosh, I mean,

"if I feel so badly about it, how did he feel?" Cos to him,

buildings were almost like people sometimes and he regarded it as a...

as a...

as a death in the family.

I think he was terribly emotional about it.

He felt things almost ridiculously.

I mean, if they were to knock down one of my favourite buildings

I would feel sad about it and I would feel it was wrong

but I wouldn't feel clinically depressed at the prospect.

But it did seem to affect Ian like that, which is very, very rare, I think.

Bolton, St Saviour Dean Road, and one of the their noblest churches.

And now look at it!

Pews flattened,

the font in pieces.

The spirit of God still here, not gone with the congregation.

He writes like someone who was doomed from the start.

He spoke like someone who was doomed

and I think he had a wonderful voice.

And there's something infinitely sad about the way these inflections,

where even when he's being...

lorditary and things,

you just know that it's all going to disappear into rubble eventually.

You talk about football vandalism...

I don't quite know how...

..you would categorise the vandalism of the yobbos who did this.

Wherever he turned, the story was the same.

and as he ventured further north to his spiritual home,

he discovered destruction on an industrial scale.

In his guts, he was a Northerner and his North

was packing up and leaving.

BANG!

While Ian was filming, old industry was collapsing and DR Beeching,

the chairman of British railways was in enacting his famous cuts.

He was wielding his axe, Beeching's axe, which was chopping

the railway to bits to make them somehow profitable and modern.

But Ian of course, like many people in Britain loved the railways.

And it wasn't just the romance of steam or romance of travel,

it was the beautiful infrastructure.

These wonderful bridges, viaducts, that rather anonymous

Victorian architects working with railway engineers had built.

And they were the very buildings being knocked down.

This is one of the wildest parts of the border

between Carlisle and Hawick.

There's just greenery, me and the railway junction.

This is Riccarton, and it really was a junction

because not only does the Carlisle-Edinburgh come through here

but also a line which went down to Bellingham,

down the Tyne Valley to Hexham.

So, you could quite literally go from here

to both King's Cross and St Pancras. Now gone, all gone.

As Nairn witnessed his beloved Britain

and all that he'd fought for disintegrating before his eyes,

he himself hit the buffers.

And with no fight left in him, the very last series

he made for the BBC saw him turn in on himself

and retreat into a world of whimsy and folly.

The last programmes he made, Finding Follies,

are deeply poignant.

I mean, first of all, the man is a human wreck.

I mean, you can see he is pretty much drunk the whole time.

That is no good for anyone - for himself,

for television producers or the audience.

This is a sort of temporary halt between follies.

This, in fact, is my favourite scrap yard.

It's right in the middle of the country...

You can see he's bruised and battered

and if you do fight continually against things that make you angry,

you get exhausted. There's no question.

Exhaustion not just physically

but exhausting your mind

and exhausting your heart and exhausting your soul,

and so I think what you see there is a man at the end saying,

"I am exhausted.

"But do look. This is where I come from

"and this is what I really love."

Folly Park at Stowe was an act of love...

..and this is an act of love of a different kind.

If you like, this is another kind of folly park,

all acts of love are folly.

It's the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden.

Follies, follies, follies.

What folly to try and restore this to flying condition,

and what a marvellous folly.

I feel this very much, because I was a pilot myself

and I learnt to fly on that thing over there,

like hundreds of thousands of others.

That's what, for me, life is all about.

It's deeply, deeply moving to see someone going back,

in a way, to what they loved and what they knew,

having fought so hard for a quarter of a century

so well and so powerfully,

but in the end, he's seeking comfort in what he knew.

On the evening of August 11th 1983,

Nairn was admitted to the Cromwell Hospital in Kensington,

where he died a few days later of cirrhosis of the liver.

He was just 52 years old.

By the time that Ian died,

I wasn't working at the Sunday Times any more.

I got a note from Dick Girling

saying... He said, "I thought you'd want to know

"Ian died on Sunday.

"It was apparently an abrupt switch-off

"minus the Walloon tart..." -

which was an old joke amongst us -

"..but otherwise much as he would have wanted.

"Don't be sad.

"As he would say, 'It's not quite like that.'

"Not bad, was he?"

It's quite sad, actually.

I haven't thought about it for years.

You know, it's a long time since he died

and it would be foolish for me to try and say

that I think of him every day, anything like that.

Quite, quite the contrary. But there are times

when a sudden view comes into sight.

I mean, like walking down here, down the quayside in Newcastle,

or I go into pubs that he liked,

then, yes, then I think of him and I miss him.

Though he ended up being buried in Ealing,

the queen of subtopian suburbs,

Nairn was to have to have the last laugh.

Well, I'm looking here at Ian Nairn's death certificate,

which is very terrible, but one odd thing jumps out.

Date and place of birth -

24 August 1930,

perfectly true,

Newcastle.

He wasn't born in Newcastle.

But he so wanted to be, wished he was.

Right to the very end, he was a Newcastle man.

By desire if not by reality.

Well, to Ian.

ALL: To Ian.

That is the right stuff.

It's lovely, that, isn't it?

You could see how you could drink lots of it if you got addicted.

-It's a big lump of drink, that is.

-Yes.

-It's a nice pub.

-I'd love to read a piece about this pub.

Wouldn't that be nice?

-I think he'd have liked it.

-I think it's OK.

-Yeah.

It's just sort of shabby enough, isn't it?

I'd like to read a piece about him

eavesdropping on what we've been saying about him.