Not all of Nairn’s buildings were post-war – the oldest featured in the 1935-built London Zoo Penguin Pool, by Daniel Lubetkin. Nairn says: ‘At the time it would have been impossible to provide something as convenient and amusing for human beings…the penguins walk solemnly up and down their interlocking concrete spirals, a parody of every committee which ever decided about the “amenity” or “the people” or “urban pattern”.’
HOLLY Court School in Merton Lane, Highgate, was built in 1960. Boasting lovely views across Hampstead Heath, and designed for the pupils, who had special educational needs, it was a physical manifestation of a society that cared for the vulnerable and believed they deserved the best.
The school has long closed, and the site is now home to ultra-pricey housing, nestled among the new-build piles of a couple of oligarchs.
The story of Holly Court school is covered in architectural critic Ian Nairn’s seminal 1964 book, Modern Buildings In London, republished in September.
Nairn covered 260 buildings across the capital, and saw enough at Holly Court to warrant including it among others that are celebrated as iconic examples of British post-war Modernism.
“It is a school for educationally sub-normal children,” he wrote, “but it is special in itself also, with dainty stock brick classrooms gently arranged on the steep leafy slope.”
His book unintentionally reveals how a generation sought to build on the victory in war to create a Britain fit for the heroes who won it.
Ian was no architect by training. He studied maths before signing up as an RAF pilot – a skill he would take into civilian life and use to explore Britain from the skies, taking footage and photographs as he explored the length and breadth of the nation.
While stationed in Norfolk, he wrote for the Eastern Daily Press, commenting on architecture and planning issues. He was given a job at Architectural Review on being demobbed, and he used the publication to warn of the creeping ribbon developments that he called “Subtopia”.
Ian Nairn [BBC]
He warned that soon the end of Southampton would look like the beginning of Carlisle, and “The parts in between looked like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.”
He worked for a time with Niklaus Pevsner, helping compile his guides to every building in the UK – but , as Pevsner noted, he was too good a writer to stick to dry paragraphs of plain description.
Ian knew what he liked and what he hated, and had the turn of phrase to tickle the reader as he explained his often-controversial opinions.
His work also reflects the times. Many of the new builds were the result of the Blitz, with bomb sites needing new builds.
There is a high proportion of public authority buildings, showing the real impact of the Labour Party’s post-war government. Schools, hospitals, and clinics – all part of the new welfare state – sprung up, and were carefully designed to improve everyone’s lives.
It is another sign of the paucity of neo-liberalist empathy and care that these buildings, built for the common good, should have been so badly neglected in future years.
As he headed to Parliament Hill, he noted a new extension to Parliament Hill School – demolished in recent years. It was considered something of a blot on the landscape – a 1950s block with flaking paint and rusting window frames, cold in the winter, too hot in the summer and costing a fortune to maintain.
Yet Nairn saw beauty and practicality in the LCC-designed block, built in 1955.
“Additions to a pre-war school, done when the LCC schools division was at its best,” he proclaimed.
“One long classroom block and an assembly hall, gay and vivacious, using curtain walling with an elan that it would be hard to match. Difficult to see, but the half revealed glimpses from Parliament Hill Fields and Lissenden Gardens are enchanting.”
Other publicly funded works also make the cut. He had high praise for social housing in NW5.
“Everyone goes to Pimlico,” wrote Nairn. “No one comes here. Yet in all sorts of ways Gospel Oak has more to offer.”
He had strolled along Lamble Street and watched with joy at the new housing.
“Here in fact is one solution for maintaining cockney character in rebuilding, if we would learn from it.”
He made these notes well before the wider redevelopment of Gospel Oak, which saw Victorian housing in Lismore Circus and surrounding streets demolished and new builds replacing them.
“To start with, the area involved is fairly small, so that there is no question of wholesale obliteration,” he added.
Lamble Street
“Secondly, it is given a compelling sense of identity by putting the tall block (10 storeys) on a made up mound. This has the same design as later Pimlico blocks, but with more stringent colouring – white brick and maroon painted floor beams. It towers above the third lesson, three terraces of houses with gardens. So instead of an average environment that fits nobody, there are extremes, high flats and back gardens. The gardens are a treat: the terraces themselves are among the best things Powell and Moya have done. If only the East End could have had this, instead of the LCC’s recent aridities.”
In a foreword, author Travis Elborough notes how the book coincided with the 1964 general election campaign, when Harold Wilson promised a new world forged “in the white heat of technology”.
It was not to last – as the 60s played out, the white heat had dimmed – from the frightening developments in weapons of mass destruction, and the use of napalm in Vietnam, to the collapse of the high-rise Ronan Point block, alongside a hippie culture that looked backwards and hankered after a William Morris-style return to nature, Modernism was on the back foot.
Soon after publication, the John Betjeman-inspired Victorian Society was raising awareness of the built environment and its conservation. It meant Nairn’s book came at a time when British Modernism was feted and popular – but would not be without critics.
“Sixty years have elapsed since Nairn wrote Modern Buildings in London and in places the city has changed beyond all recognition, for good or ill,” Travis adds.
And he notes how many of the buildings Nairn celebrated have been demolished.
Nairn’s book is a timely reminder of both the changing nature of aesthetics, how buildings shape a neighbourhood while also being a reflection of the wants and needs and vision of the future purveyed at the time. They also speak of a sense of civic value – a time when local authorities were driving a rebuild of a war-damaged city, and doing it for the people who would live there, not for property speculators’ bank balances.
Reading the book today, the wastefulness of the neo-liberal project of the past 45 years is laid bare. Many of the local authority-owned buildings are spoken about in hushed and revered tones – and Nairn did not dish out praise without thought.
But in recent years the buildings he praises have been seen as rotten carbuncles, not fit for purpose, too expensive to save.
It highlights the damage wrought by the lack of continued investment in our public stock, arising out of the corrosive Thatcherite philosophy.
• Modern Buildings In London by Ian Nairn, with a new introduction by Travis Elborough, is published by Notting Hill Editions in September