The historical context of Outrage by Ian Nairn
By Travis Elborough, author of the introduction to NHE’s new reissue of Outrage by Ian Nairn
The architectural writer and broadcaster Ian Nairn was once as familiar a figure on British
television as Sir John Betjeman. He was, however, to die in near obscurity in 1983 at just 52 years
of age, having succumbed to alcoholism, driven by melancholy despair. With Nairn it is sometimes too easy to become fixated on that end, and the unfulfilled potential of a truly great writer. So it’s worth returning now to the work that first made his name, and provide some historical context to Outrage.
Initially an incendiary special issue of The Architectural Review, quickly republished as a book, it was first published in June 1955. Appearing a full year head of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, it led Nairn, its author and aged only 24, being hailed in the press as ‘the original angry young man’. What irked this Brillo-haired young upstart, however, was not a posh wife insistent on the ironing, the Church and the Sunday papers – but the state of Britain’s built environment.
Rallying against homogenising
Nairn, a Bedford-born, Surrey-raised former RAF pilot with no architectural training, excoriated what he saw as the slew of homogenising developments that were erasing the differences between town and country. The result, he believed, was ‘the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern’. What was emerging was an ever-expanding characterless zone, a sort of suburbanisation on steroids that he dubbed ‘Subtopia’. This phenomenon, if left unchecked, he presciently forecast, would lead to ‘the end of Southampton’ looking like ‘the beginning of Carlisle’ and the parts in between looking like ‘the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.’ Cities too, he believed, were losing their unique character, with planners, architects and municipal authorities all too often also conspiring to inflict what he subsequently called their ‘father knows best’ schemes on urban inhabitants.
What has remained from the original context of Outrage?
Outrage is inevitably a work of its time, a period when the need to rebuild remained urgent and the
paternalistic desire to make the world anew had a unique potency. Nairn issued his opening salvo
some seventy years ago; he never could have foreseen the near-complete disappearance of
industry and manufacturing, or the arrival of out-of-town retail parks, city-centre student
accommodation silos (the generic-Tesco-metro-metropolitan, if you will), and distribution hubs – let
alone a digital-enabled present that often privileges the virtual and the distant over the near and
real. Commercial television had yet to begin broadcasting in Britain when Outrage first came out,
after all. Nairn was writing too before even limits to the heights of buildings in London had been
abolished, and when politicians of all stripes – including the newly re-elected Conservative
administration under Anthony Eden – were fully committed to the continued mass building of council
homes and the creation of a second wave of new towns. Yet in terms of what we’ve ended up with,
our world surely looks never more subtopian. And if he were alive today, arguably mendacious
commercial property developers and their enablers, rather than municipal authorities and
government bureaucrats, would most likely be in his sights.
Some of the targets of Outrage have naturally gone, its route-maps chart mostly vanished territory, an A-Road Britain without a single motorway to call its own – but its polemical power is undiminished by age.
Dismay, alas, continues to be a valid response to much of what surrounds us.
About Travis Elborough
Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, Travis Elborough is the author of many books, including Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles and Atlas of Vanishing Places, winner of Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020.
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