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Nairn's London (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Description for Nairn's London (Penguin Modern Classics) mass_market. Presents a subjective meditation on a city and its buildings including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs. Series: Penguin Modern Classics. Num Pages: 288 pages. BIC Classification: 1DBKESL; AMX. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 181 x 118 x 19. Weight in Grams: 254.

TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

'This book is a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.'

Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic, poetic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.

Product Details

Publication date

2014

Publisher

Penguin Classics

Condition

New

Series

Penguin Modern Classics

Number of Pages

368

Format

Paperback

Place of Publication

London, United Kingdom

ISBN

9780141396156

SKU

KJH0000142

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days

Ref

99-1

About

Ian Nairn (1930-1983) was a hugely influential and pugnacious architectural critic, inventor of the crushing term 'subtopia' and central to the growth of the British conservation movement. He co-wrote with Nikolaus Pevsner the Sussex volume in the Buildings of England series. London was his great obsession and Nairn's London his lasting monument. He once paid his wife the compliment of ... Read more

Reviews for Nairn's London (Penguin Modern Classics)

A masterpiece ... Nairn was a poet ... Nairn's London belongs to no genre save its own, it is of a school of one ... There is barely a page which does not contain some startling turn of phrase
Jonathan Meades Once you discover him, which in my case was through my dad's copy of Nairn's London, you want ... Read moreto read everything he's written ... He was a literary romantic, with a poetic sensibility
Andrew M. Brown
Daily Telegraph
He taught us how to look
Deyan Sudjic One of the finest and most evocative books ever written about a city ... He could see beauty where others just saw dirt, chaos and decay. He delighted in the obscure ... it took me to wonderful buildings and unusual places I probably would not otherwise have discovered. Everything he wrote is worth rereading. During his short, furious, productive career, Ian Nairn had a more beneficial effect on the face of Britain than any other architectural writer of his time ... a great and hugely rewarding book
Gavin Stamp His attacks on the banality of Britain's postwar buildings made Ian Nairn an inspiration for a generation of architectural critics.
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
Arguably the finest architectural writer of the twentieth century ... vivid, sensual descriptions of buildings, a way of writing about architecture that I'd never imagined possible before ... his masterpiece ... a work of architectural criticism and architectural history of huge sophistication and erudition, a rum, bawdy and drunken dance up a back alley, a hymn to those rare moments where the individual and the collective meet
Owen Hatherley One of the best and oddest guidebooks to any city ever written
Simon Bradley
Evening Standard
He had the gift of the potent image, making buildings and places animate or human ... anyone who cares even slightly about their surroundings should be intensely grateful ... His common themes are a passion for character, distinctiveness, contrast and surprise, for the unselfconscious and the visceral, and a matching loathing for the statistical, the phoney, the cold, the tepid, the routine, the indifferent and for what he called the "prettification" of places ... His approach was personal and visual, to capture emotional reactions in front of buildings, and record them with literate beauty
Rowan Moore
Observer
Ian Nairn taught me and a lot of us to look at the world
David Thomson Show Less

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