Ian Nairn
A week or two ago I mentioned Ian Nairn, the ill-tempered writer on architecture, planning and what would now be called "the environment". I referred to Nairn's once-infamous book Outrage, perhaps giving the impression that I'd read it. Actually I was bluffing ...I'd only heard of it. Once or twice I'd half-heartedly looked for a copy online, but all those I found were impossibly expensive. I tried again and tracked down a slightly tatty "good reading copy" for £20 at Abe books. Apparently the book had originated, in June 1955, as a special issue of the Architectural Review and was subsequently issued between hard covers.
Britain, said Nairn, was a country of 50 million people which could decently contain 25 million. It was developing into an even spread of traffic roundabouts, wire fences, preserved monuments, bogus rusticities, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks, bungalows and Things In Fields. He called this condition "Subtopia", which he defined as the idealisation and universalisation of our town fringes. Our suburbs, Nairn said, were spreading rather than growing ...not just out into the country, but in towards our devitalised city centres, leaving no real distinction between town, suburb and country. There was only Subtopia ...everywhere.
Since reading the book I have found myself looking at things through Nairn's eyes, and wondering what he would make of it now. Our population officially passed the 60 million mark last year. The depopulation of our towns has been constant since Nairn's time. In Britain everyone carries a kind of rustic ideal in his heart and there is a corresponding anti-urban bias. Everyone wants to live in a simulacrum of the countryside. The result is that, to a much greater degree than abroad, English people live far from their work and must spend two hours every day in the forced comradeship of public transport, or the forced isolation of their own cars. In recent times the migration to the suburbs has continued into the villages and small towns of every city's hinterland. Every city has turned itself inside-out, depositing its substance on its outskirts and in the surrounding countryside. The infrastructure of commuting has proliferated everywhere as a result. The roads in themselves are bad enough, but the lamps, roundabouts, barriers, signs, bollards, lay-bys, lane markings and fences double the visual impact. At night, however far you go into what we think of as the country, you can always see the sickly orange glow, illuminating the undersides of the clouds, of the lighting on the nearest main road ...provided for the estate of new houses on the edge of some nearby village.
The detail has changed since Nairn's time. He got very worked-up about abandoned airfields and military installations left all over the countryside, but he was writing ten years after the war and the issue has largely disappeared. Otherwise it's the same only worse. The greatest agent of Subtopia is new building in rural areas, but agro-technology, the leisure and heritage industries, out-of-town shopping (another important factor in the devitalising of our cities), commercial forestry and, lately, I would say, wind farms, have all promoted Nairn's nightmare vision of a homogeneous, undifferentiated Subtopian Britain. It's rather as though you put everything ...town, suburbs and country... into a blender, whisked it for 50 years and then splodged out the resultant material onto the surface of our country.
Ian Nairn
A week or two ago I mentioned Ian Nairn, the ill-tempered writer on architecture, planning and what would now be called "the environment". I referred to Nairn's once-infamous book Outrage, perhaps giving the impression that I'd read it. Actually I was bluffing ...I'd only heard of it. Once or twice I'd half-heartedly looked for a copy online, but all those I found were impossibly expensive. I tried again and tracked down a slightly tatty "good reading copy" for £20 at Abe books. Apparently the book had originated, in June 1955, as a special issue of the Architectural Review and was subsequently issued between hard covers.
Britain, said Nairn, was a country of 50 million people which could decently contain 25 million. It was developing into an even spread of traffic roundabouts, wire fences, preserved monuments, bogus rusticities, gratuitous notice-boards, car parks, bungalows and Things In Fields. He called this condition "Subtopia", which he defined as the idealisation and universalisation of our town fringes. Our suburbs, Nairn said, were spreading rather than growing ...not just out into the country, but in towards our devitalised city centres, leaving no real distinction between town, suburb and country. There was only Subtopia ...everywhere.
Since reading the book I have found myself looking at things through Nairn's eyes, and wondering what he would make of it now. Our population officially passed the 60 million mark last year. The depopulation of our towns has been constant since Nairn's time. In Britain everyone carries a kind of rustic ideal in his heart and there is a corresponding anti-urban bias. Everyone wants to live in a simulacrum of the countryside. The result is that, to a much greater degree than abroad, English people live far from their work and must spend two hours every day in the forced comradeship of public transport, or the forced isolation of their own cars. In recent times the migration to the suburbs has continued into the villages and small towns of every city's hinterland. Every city has turned itself inside-out, depositing its substance on its outskirts and in the surrounding countryside. The infrastructure of commuting has proliferated everywhere as a result. The roads in themselves are bad enough, but the lamps, roundabouts, barriers, signs, bollards, lay-bys, lane markings and fences double the visual impact. At night, however far you go into what we think of as the country, you can always see the sickly orange glow, illuminating the undersides of the clouds, of the lighting on the nearest main road ...provided for the estate of new houses on the edge of some nearby village.
The detail has changed since Nairn's time. He got very worked-up about abandoned airfields and military installations left all over the countryside, but he was writing ten years after the war and the issue has largely disappeared. Otherwise it's the same only worse. The greatest agent of Subtopia is new building in rural areas, but agro-technology, the leisure and heritage industries, out-of-town shopping (another important factor in the devitalising of our cities), commercial forestry and, lately, I would say, wind farms, have all promoted Nairn's nightmare vision of a homogeneous, undifferentiated Subtopian Britain. It's rather as though you put everything ...town, suburbs and country... into a blender, whisked it for 50 years and then splodged out the resultant material onto the surface of our country.