Simon Heffer: Will the spread of ugliness across Britain never stop?

Telegraph

09-03-2025

Ian Nairn, the architecture critic, achieved fame in 1955, aged 25, when an edition of the Architectural Review was devoted to an essay by him. He often appeared on television in the 1960s and 1970s, and contributed to two volumes of Nikolaus Pevsner 's The Buildings of England series: Surrey and Sussex. Pevsner admired Nairn's writing, but found him too subjective and the collaboration ended. In his television programmes, Nairn's subjectivity comes across as profound passion. His manner was possibly related to his alcoholism, which deepened throughout his adult life and killed him in 1983, days before his 53rd birthday.
The illustrated essay in the Architectural Review – named, with an appropriate lack of understatement, Outrage – has long been out of print, absurdly for a piece deemed influential in how we think about our built environment, the damage done to it in modern times and the landscapes it occupies. However, it has just been handsomely republished by Notting Hill Editions and, seven decades after it was written, remains an essential volume for anyone who minds about why our country looks as it does. Nairn revelled in Britain's local and regional differences, but his outrage was directed at what he called Subtopia, which he defined as 'the annihilation of the difference by attempting to make one type of scenery standard for town, suburb, countryside and wild'.
Outrage maps a road trip from Southampton to Carlisle in the mid-1950s, and Nairn makes his point about the drab uniformity of 20th-century Britain by discussing how the suburban road leading out of Southampton looks much the same as the suburban road leading into Carlisle, lined with tedious rows of semi-detached houses, and littered with advertising hoardings, telephone wires, ugly street furniture (especially lampposts) and the odd pylon.
Nairn insists he is not opposed to development or progress, but rather thoughtlessness when it comes to design, the standardisation that makes Southampton look like Carlisle, and the insensitivity with which existing landscapes are treated by the imposition of new features. He also rages against phoneyness: if anything is as bad as turning parts of rural England into towns, it is trying to impose rural features, such as half-hearted plantings of trees and shrubs, on urban ones.
He was writing at a time, too, when little effort had been made to clean up the countryside after the Second World War. Many former Army bases and airfields had been allowed to rot once they were no longer needed, leaving ugly collections of tatty huts, decaying concrete roads and abundant wire fences all over the place.
He called for adherence to 'the basic principle of visual planning', which he saw as being 'to maintain and intensify the difference between places', thus eliminating the uniformity so beloved by local authorities and their planners. He urged readers who shared his views to write to their local councils to complain. He told them not to seek to put the clock back, because they couldn't, but to lobby for a thoughtful application of the features of the modern world.
'Three things have got to be accepted about Britain,' he wrote. 'It is industrial, overcrowded and small. These all suggest one conclusion, that all our development must be high-density and small-area.' By these means, towns could be divided from countryside to the benefit of both; the alternative was 'blurred edges' and the spread of ugliness into rural areas.
One cannot read Outrage today without seeing an England that, despite Nairn's efforts, has existed throughout our lives. We are no longer industrial, but we are more overcrowded now than then (the population of these islands, all of whom have to live somewhere, has grown by up to a third). The detritus of the war has gone; many new buildings are of higher specification, and planning has become more strategic and sometimes even adheres to the idea of an aesthetic.
But a lot of places still look horrible, distinctions have been lost, and a new range of pylons is about to march across East Anglia to the Thames. Nairn reminds us that we have a right not to put up with this and retain the power to complain. But will we?