The past and future of London
Ian Nairn (in 1964) and Ken Livingstone (in 1982) show us where the capital has been and where we're headed...
The Future of London, 1982
Here’s a fascinating programme from 1982, at a low point in London’s population, down two million from 1939 and also from today. Wrestling with how to reconfigure London is Ken Livingstone, then leader of the GLC, a body soon to be abolished by the Conservative government. His comments on speculative office developments here feel in direct contradiction to what he did as Mayor of London when elected decades later. But it’s amazing to see what people thought the big issues of the day were for London then and for the future, and how London’s most senior politican aimed to tackle them.
Polaroids of Croydon walk
Geek on the streets! I’m repeating my Polaroids of Croydon walk, this time as part of London Open House.
On the eve of the millennium I took polaroids to capture the postwar buildings of the town where I’d been born, and felt sure were soon to disappear. That walk forms the basis of one of the chapters from my most recent book, Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain. This walking tour retraces my steps on a fun and informative architectural exploration of an overlooked suburban centre, and tells the story of the last few decades of Britain through the urban design, pop culture and social history of a town caught on the cusp of sitcom punchline and hipster cool.
The route will take in the celebrated Threepenny Bit building, the ghosts of modern towers, traces of Medieval, Victorian and Art Deco Croydon, long-disappeared theatres and cinemas, the Fairfield Halls arts centre and all sorts of extraordinary new landmarks and pop-ups.
I’m leading two walks on Sunday 17th September, one starting at 10am, one at 2pm. It’ll be fun, honest! Tickets here.
Modern Buildings in London
Fancy a spot of mid-century time travel? Well, take a trip back to London in the early 1960s, and go exploring with Ian Nairn, in his recently reissued 1964 guidebook to modern buildings in the city (and beyond).
I love the emotionally charged writing of Ian Nairn. The great critic and architectural commentator of the British post-war world used journalism, books and TV to attempt to celebrate the good and correct the bad, at a moment when the dreams of progress were becoming concrete reality. Commissioned by London Transport, Modern Buildings in London was a gazetteer of new-ish architecture. He covered 260 buildings across the capital, the idea being it would encourage people to explore the city by bus and Tube.
My original copy I found in a second-hand shop many years ago, a dear little paperback with pages brown-edged with age and the cheapness of the production. What appealed was the purity of it, Nairn the contrarian commissioned to be at his most positive, writing at the moment before the modernist project went off the rails.
Read the rest of my review of the reissue of Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London over at Inside Croydon.
Layers of London
Some of you may be familiar with this site. Layers of London is put together by the Institute of Historical Research and is both an excellent map-based database of London sites (interesting how many of Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London entries are listed here, for example) and a tool for creating walks and guides of the city. And if you like an old (or not so old) pub, there’s the history of so many recorded here, it’s fantastic. It’s fairly easy to use, and an amazing resource for researchers, or people like me who are just chronically nosy.