Ian Nairn: Neglected No More

Half a century ago, anywhere from imposing Regent Street or a minor side turning off St Martin’s Lane to a grand Victorian pub in Tooting or a church in Wanstead where ‘the huge tomb of Sir Josiah Child, who died in 1699, looks exactly as if a self-made man had paid top price per yard for servile adulation’, you might have encountered a lumbering, mildly dishevelled, preoccupied figure making notes for a guide to London. When it was published in 1966 it would prove to be unlike any other. ’A record of what has moved me, between Uxbridge and Dagenham,’ Ian Nairn called it: what had moved him, as his readers discovered, sometimes to rapture, sometimes to rage.