Outrage

Acclaimed architectural critic Ian Nairn's masterpiece, reissued for the first time since 1955.

In June of 1955, The Architectural Review (Britain's most acclaimed and well-read magazine of architectural criticism) published a special issue featuring one essay called Outrage by Ian Nairn. As one of Britain’s most famously opinionated (and untrained) architectural critics, it came as no surprise that the issue opened with a prophecy of doom: “that if what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate,” then all can be expected is the subsequent loss of the individuality and spirit of Britain’s natural, and urban, landscapes.

Nairn coined this phenomenon “Subtopia” and demonstrated it, throughout the issue, with mugshots of offending lampposts, arterial roads, and garrotted trees. For the first time in North America and the first time in decades in the UK, Nairn’s influential essay is newly available, now in a handsome volume complete with the original images.

Ian Nairn (1930–1983) was a British architectural critic and topographer who coined the term “Subtopia” for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. In the 1960s he contributed to the volumes on Surrey and Sussex in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series and published a number of his own books, including Nairn’s Paris and Modern Buildings in London, published by Notting Hill Editions.

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 the Edward Stanford Travel Book Award in 2020.