Nairn's Towns

About the Author

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.