[4] It was regularly recommended by American film critic Roger Ebert to students seeking to improve their prose, and he wrote an introduction for the book in a 2002 printing.

[5] He worked with his second wife, Judy Perry, on the writing of the Surrey guide, and its dust cover noted that the "only way she could ensure the volume's appearance on time was to marry him.

[10] He was originally quite optimistic about the prospects of postwar modernism to positively reshape Britain's cities, but though the 1960s, his attitude became much more negative.

Instead it follows the course of the alleyway next to it that he argues, with six steps and a sharp corner, "has the drama of a full symphonic movement, charged up by the stupendous classical detail that bores a hole in your right flank".

He particularly enjoys Sir John Soane's Museum which he terms "an experience to be had in London and nowhere else, worth travelling across a continent to see in the same way as the Sistine Chapel or the Isenheim altarpiece".

He writes appreciatively about the work of Denys Lasdun but is dismissive of the Loughborough Estate as an "arid geometrical exercise" and the Alton Estate in Roehampton as a place where the "eye of technique and elegance in individual buildings is wide open; the eye of understanding and feeling for a total place is firmly shut".

[7] As I explored London, Nairn in hand, there was something else I observed in addition to his acute eye and fierce passion.

[5]In the 1966 review of the book in The Guardian, Nairn is described as playing "the part of (yet another) enfant terrible of his profession" and being "of blood and, yes, guts, and beer, in full swing".

That review goes on to say that the book was "necessary for all who love London, though they fall dead from apoplexy reading it", as Nairn attacks many of the capital's most respected buildings, including Bedford Square and Horse Guards Parade.

He contended that the decision to not print any more copies was "no doubt on the bleakly practical calculation that London today is no longer Nairn's London"[14] In 2014, it was republished with identical text and typeface by Penguin to glowing reviews, with The Guardian writing that it was a "Horatian monument in words more lasting than bronze" and a "funny and poetic, highly subjective and slightly mad" depiction of the metropolis.

[16] A 2017 review in The New Criterion said that it was a "a sort of bleary-eyed love letter to the buildings that define the city" and that it offered an alternative future for London.