Ian Nairn

He published two strongly personalised critiques of London and Paris, and collaborated with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered his reports to be too subjective, but acknowledged him as the better writer.

[2] Nairn had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate (University of Birmingham) and a Royal Air Force pilot, flying Gloster Meteor aircraft.

[3] In 1955, Nairn established his reputation with a special issue of the Architectural Review called "Outrage" (later as a book in 1956), in which he coined the term "Subtopia" for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place.

He also praised modernist urban developments such as the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, which became increasingly unpopular due to the subordination of pedestrians to cars and was demolished in the early 21st century.

[4] Jonathan Glancey has compared Nairn's opinions with those of the town planner Thomas Sharp, as well as with earlier writers such as William Cobbett and John Ruskin, all of whom shared a vision of potentially invidious urbanization needing to be mitigated by clearly delineated rural space, "compact towns co-existing with a truly green countryside of which we are stewards, not consumers or despoilers".

Pevsner, who wrote about "Visual Planning and the Picturesque", was influential on the formation of the Architectural Review's "Townscape" series of columns, which evolved into the movement to which Gordon Cullen and Nairn were key contributors.

[7] In common with several architectural writers and academics at the time, Nairn had already made small contributions to the series – in his case the volumes on Essex, Norfolk and Northumberland.

"[11] This contrast between exhaustive description (Pevsner) and passionate, sometimes emotional, enthusiasm (Nairn) is noted by Alec Clifton-Taylor in his review of Sussex in the Listener on 15 July 1965.

He said in 1972 of a recently disused signal box in Longtown, Cumberland, that he could imagine it being turned into a house, with the lever frames left in place and converted to beer pumps.

[26] In a similar vein, in the small town of Précy-sur-Oise near Beauvais, he notes "a collection of ordinary things ('wobbly suspension bridge...grain silo...a sign saying Ruberoid') transformed into uniqueness".

[27] (The reissued 2017 edition of Nairn's Paris omits these descriptions which appear in the chapters describing buildings in the wider Ile-de-France area such as Chartres, Reims and Beauvais céathedrals, the abbey church of Saint Martin des Bois, the town of Provins, several châteaux, and numerous hamlets and villages which Nairn deemed to be noteworthy, often, as in the case of Quevauvillers, because of their – for him – charming ordinariness).

In his concerns about the encroaching blandness of modern design, he was the heir of literary men who had similarly been critics of the spread of an Edwardian suburbia, such as E.M. Forster ("success was indistinguishable from failure" there), and John Betjeman ("red-brick rashes"), and which fed into the Campaign to Protect Rural England among others.

[3] Writers and critics influenced by Nairn include Jane Jacobs, J. G. Ballard, Will Self, Patrick Wright, Michael Bracewell, Jonathan Glancey, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp, Owen Hatherley and Jonathan Meades,[29] who said of his account of Surrey: Mere architectural description could not suffice for that land of joke-oak and real rhododendron; what it demands is an acute sense of place and the gift to render that sense.

In the 2005 film Three Hours From Here Andrew Cross retraced the extensive journey across England that Nairn took to research and write Outrage in 1955.