From London to Lancashire Nairn Across Britain

BBC Four Collections - archived programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

This is the bar in the basement

of the Architectural Review's offices in Westminster.

Bars and architecture...

Ian Nairn died seven years ago at the age of 53.

This is where he began his career,

in the mid-'50s, as a sort of enfant terrible of architectural criticism.

Unlike many such creatures, Ian Nairn never mellowed,

he never succumbed to the embrace of the English Establishment.

Even had he wanted to, he couldn't have.

There was nothing desiccated or understated about him.

He exhibited the profoundly un-English attribute of passion.

It's in the beer, bustle the convulsion,

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

not just...tourists coming to watch a spectacle!

Because they disgust me

and I'll probably get through more alcohol in a week

than most of those bastards get through in a year!

Bolton - St Saviour, Deane Road.

By Paley and Austin. 1882 - 1885.

And one of their noblest churches.

And now look at it!

Talk about football vandalism...

I don't quite know how...

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

It makes me ashamed to be part of the same branch of biology.

MEADES: No-one has ever written about buildings with greater passion

and I suspect that

no-one has ever written about buildings so eloquently.

This was not least because he knew as much about writing as he did

about buildings, he was not just a terrific architectural writer,

he was a terrific writer full stop.

Has prose was and indeed is vivid...

demotic, poetic, vital, and thankfully,

the absolute obverse

of that straightened English of Nancy Mitford.

Nairn was defiantly non-U.

He was, and it's an expression you don't hear much today, "redbrick".

That was usually a deprecation, but I don't intend it thus, anything but,

he was a genuine outsider.

If he belonged to a type, it was to a type of one.

There are correspondences, though.

He reminds me of Anthony Burgess crossed with Tony Hancock

with a bit of Jeffrey Bernard thrown in

and maybe a dash of the Richard Cobb of Promenades.

He's the only man to have written a guidebook

that is a literary masterpiece.

Nairn's London is a great and various poem to this city

and a tour de force of topographical sensibility.

It's the work of a weird virtuoso.

Over the next six weeks, BBC Two is transmitting six of the films

he made for telly in the late '60s and early '70s.

Scholars of the platform are sure in for a treat

and so too is anyone else who reveres originality, who reveres contact with

an independence of spirit and with profligacy of ideas.

Nairn threw away in asides ideas that others would have spun out

into entire programmes, into whole series even.

If some of the filmic techniques seem a bit dated,

and nothing dates quite like the recent past,

there is only a weary freshness about the man himself.

If he was the victim of his generation,

it was only in his willingness to find good in modern buildings

in which we can now only see bad.

But that doesn't matter.

And nor does it matter that his mostly ad hoc scripts

are less polished than his written prose.

The quality of the building, which is so rare in modern architecture.

These bricks, they're solid, they're there,

the pointing's been carefully done.

No-one's going to say of this, "Oh, how shoddy were last year's ideas."

They'll recognise it was built at a certain time -

it was built for 1972 - just as you would say the same

of a Gothic cathedral that was built for 1300 or 1500.

MEADES: The thing about Ian Nairn is that he opens our eyes

to the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

His love of Belgium, of Halifax, of the hidden bits of forgotten towns

is not perverse, he simply failed to get conditioned

or institutionalised by common ideas of what is good and what isn't.

He abhorred the cute, the half-baked and the prettified.

He sought out the essence of a place and it's our good fortune

that he not only usually found it,

but that he was able to transmit his sadness, or his delight,

or scorn, or whatever,

in a manner that remains unique and exhilarating.

The first film takes him from London to Manchester

and it's notable for its diversion to Northampton,

which was then in the process of being destroyed

by braindead town planners.

It was because of people like Nairn that not more was destroyed.

But his voice was not heard as loudly as it should have been.

In Nairn's day, architectural journalism was ghettoised,

it was peripheral. Architecture was not a mainstream subject.

Today it is and the unthinkable has occurred,

the leading newspaper in this country is edited by a man who made his name

writing about the depredations of British townscapes and buildings.

NAIRN: Marble Arch in London

is a good place to begin a set of journeys,

journeys whose purpose is first to show the astonishing

variety of landscape and townscape there is in Britain,

more than any other country in a small area that I know...

and second, to try and guess at what we are doing to it,

whether what we do on the landscape

is going to enhance the variety or diminish it.

But Marble Arch, especially for my first journey,

which is a simple line, a direct line between London and Manchester...

It isn't the same as hammering it up the M1.

It's a very different story, in fact.

It only goes through one big town.

In between there are marvellous passages of tranquillity

and a marvellous variety of landscape and village,

and the road to Manchester starts as it started for 2,000 years,

just over there, the Edgware Road, the Romans' Watling Street

and now as then,

it simply points like an arrow to the Midlands and the North.

Going up the Edgware Road...

is a good place to check what we're doing to the townscape

and if Marble Arch is an improvement, here, it's a sad diminishing

because it's always been a funny, quirky, rough and tumble place,

not quite in the West End,

you never know what you're going to meet quite next.

When I first came to London,

the Edgware Road actually looked like that.

The buildings were, up and down, Victorian,

some sleazy, some posh...

Now they've all been replaced

and while the character of the Edgware Road

and the people is still there -

it's still the funny old mixture it always was -

the buildings have become smooth, platitudinous.

Running down the hill now to Cricklewood,

which is one of the long, straight suburban high streets

on this way out of London.

It works pretty well.

The buildings are undistinguished enough,

but they planted trees when all this went up in the 1880s and '90s and...

now you can feel a sense of identity here,

that's what the business is basically all about.

That straight line from London to Manchester has now taken us beyond

the rather tatty edges of London, out into the real countryside.

This is the first big landscape change,

it's a chalk ridge and though you can't see much here -

it's enclosed -

actually, a lot of this was planted at the Festival of Britain time,

so there's another improvement.

This thick planting suddenly, right at the top of the ridge,

gives way to openness, open down land.

You're on the roof of the world.

It's Dunstable Downs.

Over there at the bottom

is one of the most famous gliding clubs in Britain.

The gliders use the scarp of the chalk to get lift,

just as they do at Sutton Bank in Yorkshire

and Great Hucklow in the Peak District.

Some people think that the gliders shouldn't be there, an intrusion,

and that I really can't see

because provided the buildings are kept modest,

the gliders themselves add to the landscape.

They're...in a partnership - man and the air and the hills -

they're getting the sustenance from the hills in a very real sense.

Here, there's a small intrusion from the parked cars of people

come to look at the gliders than there is from the gliders themselves.

I've never done any gliding,

but everyone who has seemed to think it's marvellous fun.

Down the road there at the bottom of the hill

is the edge of Dunstable town.

There's a modern building

where the designer has had quite considerable fun.

When I first saw it,

I thought this was a church with those two great rocking roofs.

It's not, it's a pub.

And although inside it's not as dramatic

because you can't see right up into the timberwork in there,

they certainly had an enormous amount of fun outside.

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,

especially in things like new shopping precincts.

One building like this could revitalise the whole thing,

it could indeed revitalise the one rather limp

in the middle of Dunstable itself

cos there the focal point is just a bit of abstract structure.

It would have been so much better

if something like this had been the focal point.

And across there, there's an exceptionally nice public park -

no railings, no notices,

just a broad wedge of grass going up between the trees

and then off into rough ground, which is the beginning of the Downs.

Now, that's public space that is really meant to be used,

it's not just an area left on a map, you know, left over,

they can't think what to do with it,

which is what so many public open spaces are.

This is necessary,

just as the gliders using the lift from the Downs was necessary.

How not to go from London to Manchester, at least for me.

The straight line route is intersected by the M1

at a couple of places this end of the journey.

Here, it's the service area at Newport Pagnell

and these, er, cafes have taken...a bit of stick.

But although they are not marvellous buildings in themselves,

the fact that there's a bridge over, I'm standing on,

from one side to the other,

means that the basic act of tying these structures

into the environment has been done.

If they'd made a tunnel instead

you'd have just had two isolated things either side.

Here, it's made a tiny knot in the landscape.

This is the basic thing, far more than the quality of buildings.

As I said, it is not my way of going from London to Manchester.

These next few miles here are exactly the straight line

and just this once, I'm going to make a motorway journey,

but, believe you me, I'd rather go from Newport Pagnell to the next town

via the quiet and winding A50 any day.

Well, there at last is my turn-off.

It's only about 10 or 11 miles, but it felt much more.

From here on in, it's about another, oh...five miles...

The place I said was the only big town, the whole way

on this direct line between London and Manchester.

- Local-grown tomatoes, light plum. - Extra large cucumber.

Peach, pear or plum.

- WOMAN: A pound, please. - SELLER: A pound, yeah?

Right. Two?

- Extra large peaches. - BOTH SELLERS: Nice, ripe peaches!

NAIRN: Northampton...

Northampton Market Square, it's a very surprising place to find in...

what is otherwise a rather drab, South Midland town.

Northampton had a fire about 1680,

it meant the whole town centre had to be rebuilt - a new church,

public buildings, and also a new market square.

And the way they rebuilt it...

..makes the place really humming.

A few of the old buildings are left, the whole rhythm is still left,

the rhythm of very narrow frontages, lots of detail,

the buildings coming out fighting.

The way everything is packed in, especially on a day like today

where the market's in full swing.

It makes it look more like Belgium

than any other town I know in England.

And, of course, it's got troubles,

it's going to expand from 120,000 to about 200,000.

That means a much bigger town centre

and as part of that, the whole of the north side here is due to be replaced

by a monolithic frontage with an office block behind

and the centre of that is the Emporium Arcade -

built 1901 and in spite of its size, it has the same quality

as the rest of the earlier, smaller buildings around the market square.

It's full of detail, things are always happening on the facade.

There's a balcony, gables and chimneys going up at the top.

You might call it debased if you were worrying about architectural styles,

though why people want to, I just don't know.

But for all that, it's a good neighbour here.

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'm very sorry.

At the moment, though, there's one hell of a fight going on.

There's been a petition.

10,000 people have signed to try and save this,

which is quite something in a town of only 120,000,

and a town with a sort of fairly pragmatic reputation.

The trouble with it originally was,

it was meant to go through at the end there

and they couldn't get the building next door,

so it became a kind of blind arcade,

which is always the worst thing for an arcade to be.

Yet, in the last ten years, it has begun to regenerate itself naturally

and meanwhile,

here's the reasons given by the council for demolishing it

as reported in the local paper.

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.

You know, what's more important, the fate of a living bit of Northampton

or just one scheme, the details of it?

Number two, "The hotchpotch of small shops, many of them rather

"on the seedy side, is an illogical use in a modern town centre."

That seems to me to be nonsense,

it's exactly what a town centre is about.

Number three, "The arcade was bought by the council for demolition

"and not as an investment."

Well, what a confession of failure.

You just buy up parts of the town to demolish them

and don't alter your opinion,

even in the face of regeneration that's already happening?!

And number four, "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 quite a considerable hill,

and that, in my experience,

which, with respect, is probably rather larger than

that of Northampton councillors, is architecturally unique.

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

I said the Leicestershire villages are pretty drab,

well, this one certainly is - Stoney Stanton.

It's about the centre of England,

it's also about halfway between London and Manchester.

A dead centre, you might think, looking at the bits of it.

Although it's fairly prosperous,

it gives the feeling of having laid down and died.

Verges just left with concrete posts and...chicken wire,

no attempt to make anything of them.

Fragments of old walls broken down.

Still a working farm, that's about the happiest thing in this village.

DOG BARKS

DOG BARKS

Yet, in spite of all that,

I did say there was one thing here which could make the place

into one of the most exciting villages in England, and it's this...

Right in the middle of the village, an abandoned quarry

with a lake at the bottom, the houses all around it.

It's very hard, very old rock, this.

It wasn't much use for building stone, you could use it for rubble.

It was more use as road metal.

Now the quarry's worked out, one side is a municipal rubbish tip,

all round the end people seem to be chipping in with their own

bits of rubbish. What a waste!

But think what could happen.

You've got a ramp there now,

you could get down and use the lake part for small-scale boating.

You could have houses all round, looking in,

taking advantage of the view

instead of shunning it and haring off somewhere else.

It makes you feel this view's too big for the people.

They daren't look at it, it would worry them too much.

You know, when you think of what Finchingfield has done

with its little duck pond, just imagine what Stoney Stanton could do.

Staunton Harold -

this group of house, church, lake in front and landscape park all around

is one of the very finest in the whole country.

It's one of the things that are just waiting quietly to be looked at

if you don't belt up the M1, that is.

That front is 1763, the church itself's about 100 years older

and it's a very remarkable building

cos it was actually built in the Commonwealth in 1653

when all the Roundheads were about.

And the person who built it was a staunch Royalist...

..so he built it defiantly Gothic - this was no preaching box -

and it has an inscription on the front which says,

"Whose singular praise it is,

"to have done the best things in the worst times."

They're sort of spitting in Cromwell's eye.

Well, Cromwell spat back because he said,

"All right, if you've got enough money to build this church,

"you've got enough money to raise a regiment."

The owner naturally wouldn't, so he went to the Tower and died there, 27.

What a memorial, though.

And this marvellous thing almost disappeared

because the house was within an ace of being pulled down in the 1950s.

Well, happily, the house wasn't demolished, it's now a Cheshire home.

The church is owned by the National Trust

and at the moment, they're just about to put up the marquees for that most

innocent of English sports, an annual fete.

The man who built this was named Shirley, Sir Robert Shirley,

and it was another Shirley, the 17th-century dramatist who said,

"Only the actions of the just

"Smell sweet and blossom in their dust."

This is exactly what has happened here, the dust has blossomed.

And although we now don't build country houses like this,

we still have the same obligation to make our dust blossom.

We can't take it with us -

we do have the chance of leaving a bit of it behind,

whether in buildings like this or in factories and power stations.

Willington power station in Derbyshire.

It's quite a historic design, it's about 15 years old now

and the architects, Farmer and Dark, made a deliberate decision

to reveal as much of the equipment as they could,

rather than wrapping it around with a brick skin,

as was done in Battersea and in so many other places.

It's almost there, I don't think it's quite successful,

but it's nearly there and there's certainly,

in the variety of the equipment, just as many shapes as there were

in the pinnacles and crockets at Staunton Harold.

What's missing to transform it, I think, is colour.

They've tried in a few ways there to paint things,

but the painting is too pallid, it's not strong enough.

It's useless trying to harmonise this with the landscape,

it just doesn't work,

it's like trying to camouflage an elephant, you won't do it.

You could have a marvellous time with this,

painting it up as a colour symphony, and why the hell not?

Because as I say, you are just not going to camouflage this,

this is a great big piece of electrical equipment.

Express it, don't be ashamed of it and don't just leave it ordinary.

They could have built Staunton Harold without pediments on the house

or without pinnacles on the church, you know,

it wouldn't have been the same.

This Willington, Derbyshire is Willington-on-Trent

and that's the last big landscape division before we get to Manchester.

You're leaving the Midlands here, you're crossing a big river

and ahead, all the way to the edge of Manchester,

is the Peak District, the hills.

There's some pretty grand scenery

on this bit of the journey from London to Manchester -

I think, myself, some of the grandest in Britain.

But what really hits me is when man and nature manage to act together -

Not just...

..landscape, landscape and buildings like this one.

Jenkin Chapel, built 1733 for the hill farmers

because the parish church was too far away

and this is absolutely the essence of necessity.

Nothing is unnecessary at all here and it adds to the landscape.

The church, like a little cottage, so humble, yet so tough.

Circular graveyard enclosure, the trees around it.

"Built for the worship of Almighty God,"

it says on the front there, and it certainly is meet.

This is Cheshire, though it doesn't look like most peoples'

idea of Cheshire.

Just over there, beyond the hills, the Cheshire Plain.

In fact, just over there, beyond those two hills,

is Stockport,

outer Manchester.

Stockport's modern shopping precinct is a precinct with a difference.

It's got an air of bustle and purpose about it

that very few of these things have.

And the reason it has is that it's been planned really intelligently.

It's built over a bit of dual carriageway that nobody wanted,

which is a pleasant idea to start with!

On either side there are old shopping streets

and instead of raising the whole lot,

they kept a lot of the shops on the old streets,

multiple stores and so on,

which simply turn back to front, so that you can now...

walk right through them, out of old Stockport into new Stockport.

Everything is plugged in,

it's the exact opposite of the Elephant and Castle,

where nothing is plugged in.

Even the multilevel system works because at the top level,

you run off onto the hilly bit of old Stockport

and from that top level,

you feel that you're bang in the middle of the industrial north -

the skyline of viaducts, cooling towers, chimneys.

It's a complete change from the peace of Jenkin Chapel.

From here to Manchester, in fact, it's completely built-up

and some of those buildings are in a pretty sad state.

Not only are the slums being cleared, but all the buildings -

the shops along the Stockport Road - are being cleared too.

And they are being cleared, not progressively, but...

..all at one...

..swoop, on both sides of the road.

The Germans couldn't have done it, the town planners have.

Now was this necessary in this way?

Assuming the clearance of the slums was necessary,

did they have to clear them all at once

instead of a rolling programme whereby you could demolish

one street at a time and replace one street at a time?

If you did it carefully enough, you need only ever have one street empty

and the people who are being rehoused

could simply move one street up the road,

which is not too much of a wrench.

Here, they are dispersed all over Manchester.

And did it have to be done in this way?

And especially, did all the shops along the main road have to go?

This one here is...

There's nothing specially wrong with that, it would last a few more years.

When its time came, all right, replace it,

but don't sweep the whole lot away in one great act of demolition.

The end of the journey, early evening,

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

It's a weird old place, really.

The gardens themselves are vital to Manchester

cos it's the only place in the whole centre of the city

where you can...sit and relax

and take a breather from what is often rather a grim place.

But it's not plugged in in the Stockport sense.

There's all the elements of a city centre here,

but they don't really relate.

There's a bus station here,

so you've got to nip through the buses to get to the gardens.

The shops over there, again, you've got to cross the road to get to them.

It's isolated elements.

Just as isolated as the weird way

the blocks on top of this Piccadilly Plaza

seem to have been designed for five other places

and brought together in a hurry.

It could be plugged in, I think.

It needs to be related more.

Say there was an extension of the plaza level

over the roofs of the buses,

open-air cafes, then steps down into the gardens.

And then, on the other side, steps underneath the gardens

to connect to the basement level of the shops.

It had bad luck in that...

what was basically a small country town

was really choked by a ring of warehouses,

right round the centre almost,

which prevented any kind of natural expansion of Manchester.

Well, the warehouses are going now, but the question is -

what's going to be put up in its place?

Could it be, for once, an actual marriage of commercial,

residential and places just to sit around and have fun in?

Because Manchester needs that.

On this whole journey up,

you've seen places like that Leicestershire village

with the quarry that have totally missed their destiny.

Places like Stockport and Dunstable Downs where the 20th century is

actually improving on what was there before.

And places like Staunton Harold, which the 20th century,

thank God, has simply left alone in its own glory...

..all places on this direct line,

all places you would never see from a motorway journey.