Nairn's Towns by Ian Nairn

Nairn's Towns by Ian Nairn

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Summary

Sixteen short essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English Architectural writer of the Twentieth Century.

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Nairn's Towns by Ian Nairn

A new edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley. These essays show Nairn writing about cities and towns as wholes rather than as collections of individual buildings. In each of them, there are several things happening at once - assessments of historic townscape, capsule reviews of new buildings, attempts to find the specific character of each place. Includes sixteen essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English architectural writer of the 20th Century.

Ian Nairn was a former Royal Air Force pilot with no architecture qualifications. In 1955 Nairn coined the term Subtopia to describe his prophetic vision of an architecturally homogenised Britain. In the 1960s Nairn contributed to Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series and published Nairn's London and Nairn's Paris. In the 1970s Nairn moved into television, producing Nairn's Travels and Nairn Across Britain for the BBC. A noted drinker, Nairn's work is full of descriptions of pubs and recommendations for beers. He died in 1983 aged 53.

Owen Hatherley is a London-based writer and journalist writing primarily on architecture, politics and culture. Hatherley has written for Building Design, the Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review and Socialist Worker. His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism". Hatherly's book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781907903816
ISBN 10 190790381X
Title Nairn's Towns
Author Ian Nairn And Owen Hatherley
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Notting Hill Editions
Year published 2017-09-07
Number of pages 240
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.