The Victorian age and the 1950s both took place in colour

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One of the best things about subscribing to the London Review of Books is that it grants you access to the magazine's archives. So it was that I was reading a book review by Jonathan Meades from 2018.

I've not read the book he is discussing – The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain by Lynda Nead – a lot of caveats apply to this post. And I'm pleased to see it has a photograph of St Saviour's Road, Leicester, on its dust wrapper. It's the same photo you see above.

Meades writes:

In The Tiger in the Smoke, fog and smog are ubiquitous. They are past and present, a continuum from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them­.... The 'characteristic colour' she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown.

He questions whether this is an adequate account of Victorian Britain, suspecting that Nead has been too influenced by Dickens and his fog, when in reality:

He lived in an age of polychromatic brickwork, dazzlingly bright inflammable crinolines, gilded smoking rooms, saturated ottomans, luminous painting, garish advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s 'rank growth'.

And I am going to question the book's account of the post-war era, at least as it is seen in this snippet on audience reaction to David Lean's Great Expectations that Meades quotes:

'What,' she wonders, 'did this fabulous cinematography mean to postwar audiences and how did it relate to the greyscale aesthetics of the fog and the bombsites?'

But bombsites weren't grey. Here's J.K. Adams writing the Guardian's Country Diary for 1 September 1948:

A gentle breeze was blowing as I walked through the badly bombed Cripplegate area of London the other day, and the feathery seeds of the rosebay willowherb were drifting before it like snowflakes. In the basements of what seven or eight years ago were shops, warehouses, and dwellings a waist-high tangle of willowherb, spear-plume thistle, and Oxford ragwort bore witness to the thoroughness with which nature reclaims the land as soon as man’s back is turned. More than that, here and there were birches and elders and various sorts of willow that had grown to a height that fully entitled them to be called trees.

It may have been a far cry to the complete return to nature envisaged by Richard Jefferies in After London, but the germ of that great reversion, one felt, was there. Even the birds have begun to return to this as to other parts of London that have gone wild. Within the past two years a linnet and both pied and grey wagtails have been seen there, and at migration time in 1946 three birds on passage looked in – a whitethroat, a wheatear, and a whinchat. Even more remarkable was the visit paid by a little owl during the autumn of that year.

Or to make it sound more exotic, here is Lucy Scholes writing about Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

I suspect London bombsites became less exotic as they were gradually cleared for redevelopment, but I still think of them as a home to lush vegetation and providing unexpected new vistas of Italianate churches.

Let's finish by going back to Victorian polychromatic brickwork. Here's something else I've found recently - a charity-shop copy of Nairn's London. In it, Ian Nairn writes of All Saints, Margaret Street:

To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. 

I'm not sure that it advances my argument, but I really want to quote it.

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"The never-not-mentioned 'slick campaigning machine' of the SNP was true in about 2006-11, but after the landslide 2011 election and especially after the referendum, complacency allowed it to dwindle." And that's just one of the Scottish Nationalist Party's problems, according to Robert McAlpine.

Matthew Pennell says an overarching health and wellness policy for children must include play.

"[Devon Malcolm] and his England colleague Phil DeFreitas - who received death threats from the Nazi National Front - successfully sued Wisden Cricket Magazine in 1995 for an article titled 'Is It In The Blood?', which accused England’s foreign-born and black players of being insufficiently committed." Andrew Stone goes deeper into the recent finding that racism, sexism and elitism are "baked into the structures" of cricket.

"In 2013 the late Labour MP Paul Flynn told the Commons that a Brethren campaign for charitable status was 'the most egregious example of intensive, million-pound lobbying by hundreds of people that I have experienced in my 25 years in the House'." Pippa Bailey takes us inside the Exclusive Brethren sect.

Travis Elborough watches No Two The Same, a 1970 film essay on Pimlico by the architectural writer Ian Nairn.

Howard Williams considers the Saxon church at Brixworth in Northamptonshire as a 'landscape of memory': "The later medieval sculptural fragments (many from tombs) are given no pride of place and stacked out of the way without heritage interpretation in a side-chapel at the east end of the south aisle."

Ian Nairn in Pimlico, 1970

The great architectural critic celebrates the village of Pimlico and its two post-war estates at Churchill Gardens and Lillington Street.

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"More than any other English-language narrative filmmaker, Roeg apprehended Tarkovsky's notion of "sculpting in time" with the same radical freedom as the Russian director himself did. Roeg came into filmmaking as a cinematographer, and two of the directors he worked for, David Lean and Richard Lester, both had as astute a grasp of editing as any filmmaker you can name. During his most creatively fecund time as a director, Roeg made temporal leaps and jumps that were exhilarating provided you could keep up, which was sometimes a challenge." Glenn Kenny tribute to Nicolas Roeg.

Robert Reich calls for Facebook to be broken up.

Grammar schools aren't the enemy, private schools are, says Charles Turner.

"The only other building in Norwich 'with the authority of the cathedral' was St James Yarn Mill on the Wensum, built in 1843 to give a boost to our waning textile trade." Reggie Unthank looks at Ian Narin looking at Norwich.

"Like David Bowie before her, she took a fascination with literature, theatre, dance and the avant-garde into the mainstream. She traded in the unusual from the beginning, and only became more radical as she went on." The Economist's Prospero reminds us what an extraordinary career Kate Bush has had.

Meg Olmert on how the Victorians invented our modern dog breeds.

This is Their Life by Jonathan Meades (1979)

Published in 1979 complete with a foreword by Mike Yarwood, this is a collection of brief pen portraits of television stars of the day.

Just to list those thought worthy of discussion brings back a lost era. James Galway, Wendy Craig, Ron Pickering, Dickie Henderson. Max Boyce, Pam Ayres, Brian Glover, Penelope Keith.

And because this is 1979 no one on television is gay and only Trevor McDonald is black.

But the real interest of This is Their Life lies in the identity of its author. It is Jonathan Meades.

Meades turned 32 in 1979 and fame was still some years away. So on first inspection this looks like hack work. But a bit of browsing reveals it is more interesting than that.

There is the choice of subjects. I doubt any other young television journalist would have included Ian Nairn and W.G. Hoskins in his list.

Look for it, and the acerbic comment is there too. David Hamilton, for instance, is “the lowbrow’s Michael Aspel”.

The gruesome Ted Rogers is suitably dealt with:

Most of his material is written in conjunction with Wally Malston, who is apparently known as ‘King of the One-Liners’, and says that Rogers is ‘a barometer of what the public is thinking’. 

So be it, but he is hardly a barometer of what the public is doing. His passion is polo – he has four ponies and plays at Cowdray Park, which is also a regular haunt of Prince Charles. 

Meades gets his Foxes right too:

Described by his mother – herself an actress and the widow of the theatrical agent, Robin Fox – as ‘the world’s worst actor’, Edward Fox was for years overshadowed by his younger brother, James, who was arguably the world’s best actor, at least in certain roles. 

But the neatest digs are aimed at two targets who are still very much with us 38 years on – the Dimbleboys, as Meades says Bernard Levin used to call them.

Their father, as everyone would have known in 1979, was Richard Dimbleby, who had been the most famous broadcaster of his day.

Here he is on David Dimbleby:

Even before he became a professional journalist, he had to learn to live with accusations of privilege. At Oxford, where he took a third in PPE, his appointment as editor of Isis was opposed by the outgoing editor Kenith Trodd, who is now a noted drama producer, and his staff. Dimbleby countered with a swingeing attack on ‘the left-wing clique’. 

A couple of years later, some journalists took it upon themselves to advise him publicly not to attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps at the BBC.

On the face of it it might appear that he has done just that, but, of course, his route and approach have been very different from Richard Dimbleby's. Whereas the father was ever reverential, the son - despite his looks and his smooth cap of hair - is rather an abrasive fellow.

 Jonathan, meanwhile, had:

wanted to be a farmer, and his father succeeded in getting him a job on the Royal farm at Windsor, where he trained to be a showjumper. 

You can find This is Their Life on Amazon for a penny, which represents good value for students of popular entertainment and Meades enthusiasts.

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Alistair Carmichael writes on the Commons debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill: "The Bill is rotten to its core and I wish we could have blocked it as we did in Coalition when faced with the Communications Data Bill. Dealing with Tories in government was difficult. Dealing with Tories in government and Labour in opposition is impossible."

The Sports Direct scandal is the result of successive governments desperate for jobs, says Conrad Landin.

"If I ever see you in the street, I hope you get shot." Dawn Foster on her experience of moderating comments on the Guardian website.

Steve Parnell looks back at the work of the angry and passionate Ian Nairn, the outspoken critic of England’s 'subtopian' demise.

The Birmingham Conservation Trust takes us to Moseley, where 1945 prefab houses can still be found.

"I think these were the first books where I really had a sense of place from them, whereas Blyton’s descriptions don’t tend to be of anywhere specific and nicely pleasantly general, Saville’s descriptions of location were precise and taken from real life. It made me want to visit Shropshire and since I was 16 or 17 I have done, frequently. Its become one of the places I love to be most in the world." A contributor to World of Blyton recalls discovering the charms of Malcolm Saville.

Ian Nairn visits Bolton and Preston

This film was made in 1975 for the BBC series Nairn's Journeys.

He was so right about the dismal shopping arcades of that decade.

Jonathan Meades on how writers invent places not describe them

Jonathan Meades reviews Nairn's London for the Literary Review and in the course of doing so says something profound about topographical writing:

Do not feel tempted to go and see for yourself. He did his work at a desk, not when he was shuffling about, all eyes and raw antennae, in his slept-in suit. The description - a distillation of a specific perception - is invariably superior to the place which it evokes, which it invents. 

The compact is, or ought to be, between writer and reader, not between place and tourist. Only if we suffer a profoundly defective misunderstanding of places as subject or as catalysts of mood or as topographical correlatives do we hurry to the Teme Valley when we read Housman or to the Marshwood Vale when we read Household.

My own Shropshire is made up from scraps of Malcolm Saville and other writers, my own visits over 25 years, friendships and much else.

And I once heard one of Saville's sons way that when he wrote Seven White Gates, in some ways the most Shropshire of all his books, he had not visited the Stiperstones. He took all that books remarkable atmosphere from Mary Webb.

So, though I have dragged a surprising number of people up from Snailbeach to see Lords Hill Chapel, you cannot visit my Shropshire.

It is true that I photograph it for you, but the ones I use here are carefully selected. The one above shows the old engine house at White Grit with the unmistakable crest of Bromlow Callow behind it.

Ian Nairn in Huddersfield and Halifax

The other day we saw Nairn visit Barnsley. Here is is in two more Yorkshire towns.

Nairn's "football towns" theme here obviously inspired an episode of Jonathan Meades' Off-Kilter.

Ian Nairn visits Barnsley

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"The United Kingdom has tumbled down global press freedom rankings in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry and the government’s reaction to the Edward Snowden leaks," reports the Independent. Not a great achievement for a government of which the Liberal Democrats are a part.

A Scottish Liberal asks if we should with draw from the pro-Union Better Together campaign: "Whatever the next few months have in store for the Lib Dems, there can be no escaping that our future in Scotland will be directly affected by the stifling relationship with Better Together."

"At Pendle Borough Council’s meeting of Election Agents yesterday the Labour Party refused to agree to a statement issued by the Borough Returning Officer, Stephen Barnes, aimed at preventing impropriety in the handling of postal votes applications and ballot papers." Harry Phibbs has the story on Conservative Home.

"Even as a youngster I was dimly aware that Wimpy lacked the swagger of its American competitors." Ashley Clark on Vice writes about the slow death of a British institution.

Pete Trewin considers recent television programmes about Ian Nairn and by Jonathan Meades.

Laura Freeman celebrates Eric Ravilious for Standpoint.

Ian Jack on Ian Nairn

There are still five days left on the BBC iPlayer to watch this week's moving documentary on Ian Nairn.

Ian Jack, who appears in the documentary, remembers Nairn in his Guardian column today:

A documentary on the BBC this week by Kate Misrahi caught his troubled personality very well – the hurt eyes, the voice that always seemed about to crack with melancholy – as it slowly drowned in a sea of beer. 

I knew him a little. He was kind about things I'd written, and once or twice I stopped at his table in our office local, the Blue Lion, where he looked as though he was being reborn as a 17-stone glass of Guinness. Bulky figure, black suit, white face. The face was flecked with sweat, while a plump fist gripped a pint that, in shape and colour, might almost have been a model of its drinker. There's no point wondering why he drank so much that he was dead at 52, or about the origins of his depression. What's more important is the way he could find interest and beauty in the apparently ordinary, and so vehemently protest its neglect or destruction – a church in Bolton, an arcade in Northampton or Newcastle.

This is a chance to say that Ian Jack's column - wise and individualistic - is consistently one of the best in the British press.

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"It seems very much to be the old Strathclyde’s way or no way at all. That’s a huge mistake. Policing needs in Glasgow are totally different from policing needs in the Highlands and Islands. What next? Tasers in Achiltibuie?" Caron's Musings dissects the paradoxical centralising tendencies of the SNP.

A debate between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage would be well worth watching, thinks Neil Monnery.

Politics for Novices is not pleased that a group of local businesses is creating a new CCTV system.

"Nairn floated gloriously free of the style wars that periodically consume British architecture, offering instead a passion for buildings and places." Icon Magazine reviews "Ian Nairn, Words in Place" by Gillian Darley and David McKie.

"I could sit occasionally with my pint in the Victoria Bar watching decay set in and wondering when the closure announcement was to be made, but we all know it didn't happen like that." Mike Horne on the transformation of Marylebone station.

IanVisits takes us to Victoria Street in London, where another five floors are being excavated beneath existing office buildings.

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"You could say capitalism is a means to an end, the end being lifting humanity out of poverty in order to enable it to lead the good life. That’s the essential point. The idea that we grow forever and ever seems to me a form of insanity because economic growth is, after all, only a means to wellbeing." Robert Skidelsky is interviewed by the British Politics and Policy at LSE Blog.

Mark Thompson offers an article template for any politico who has been outraged by anything - think The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank You Letter.

Caught by the River remembers the forgotten genius of Ian Nairn.

"A great many of his photos depict holidaymakers and day-trippers determinedly eating in the most unlikely or unpromising circumstances." That's How the Light Gets In reviews "Only in England" - the Science Museum's exhibition of the photographs of Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr.

My Tonight from Shrewsbury has an appreciation of the town's Castle Gates Library.

"A player like Graeme Swann comes about once in a lifetime and we should be grateful we were the generation of fans who got to experience his career." Beth Jakubowski, writing for the University of York student newspaper Nouse, pays tribute to the England spinner who announced his retirements

Northampton Past and Present 1

I have come across a series of short videos (cut from one longer film) about the history and buildings of Northampton. They were shot in 1992, so their past and present has become past and past.

Rob, who made the film, warns: "Unless you have an interest in Northampton, or in history, you may find them a bit heavy-going." But I am sure we all have those interests here.

This first video shows you more of the last days of the Emporium Arcade, which Ian Nairn also witnessed.

Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

It takes courage to open a new bookshop today: there is only a Waterstones left in Leicester (though we still have a Waterstones and an independent bookshop here in Market Harborough). So when I heard that the Five Leaves Publications had opened a shop in Nottingham, I determined to visit the next time I was in the city.

I was there today and was not disappointed. The Five Leaves Bookshop is in an alley near the Council House and well worth a visit.

Like the Five Leaves Publications list, the shop has a left-wing feel, but it is widely interpreted. One of the best things the Five Leaves Press has done is keep alive the voices of distinctive figures like Richard Boston and Ray Gosling, who would otherwise have been forgotten.

It has also played a central part in the revival of interest in Ian Nairn by publishing the study of his career by Gillian Darley and David McKie - Ian Nairn: Words in Place.

Incidentally, Left Lion tells us that when the head of Five Leaves, Ross Bradshaw, came to Nottingham in 1979 it had five radical bookshops.

Ian Nairn in Northampton

The site of this lost arcade in Northampton is occupied by the Grosvenor Centre, which is the shopping centre you find yourself in (if you are lucky) when you exit the town's doomed Greyfriars bus station.

I found it via a Daily Telegraph blog post by Andrew M. Brown. He quotes Jonathan Meades on Nairn's broadcasting style:

He was a person, not a personality… You never get the feeling that he'd pined all his life to stand in front of a camera. He was doubting and melancholic and vulnerable…. It's a voice full of quiet despair. The repetitively falling cadence suggests an acute awareness of human impermanence and death's proximity.

By contrast, Meades programmes are tightly written and, as Brown puts it, tightly choreographed. Even the scripts can make you laugh out loud.

Jonathan Meades talks about Museum Without Walls

When writing about Ian Nairn the other day I mentioned Jonathan Meades' recent book Museum Without Walls.

Here he is on Loose Ends last year talking about it.

The Ian Nairn revival

Ever since I posted a video of Ian Nairn - a figure I had heard of but did not know a great deal about - I have been coming across references to him.

In the Observer a few days ago Rowan Moore told us that Nairn's work is being rediscovered and his life remembered in a new book - Ian Nairn: Words in Place by Gillian Darley and David McKie.

Moore wrote:

Nairn defended the particularities of place, people's right to inhabit their localities as they wish, and the beauty and character in the spaces around us. He raged against the destructive collusion of corporations and government. Gravesend, as do most British towns, shows that these battles still need to be fought. In the shadow of Blair's third way, in which we are still living, such collusions are more powerful than ever, which is why interest in Nairn is now resurgent.

And:

Nairn, in his raincoat and Morris Minor, was an unlikely Icarus. He flew, he burned, he drowned. As alcoholism is now recognised as a disease, we should perhaps simply say that that is what killed him, but it might also be possible to guess that, in asking architecture to fill an emotional void, he was seeking the impossible. Also, that, in wanting officialdom to feel as intensely about places as he did, he was doomed to disappointment. But anyone who cares even slightly about their surroundings should be intensely grateful for his attempt.

Then I bought myself Jonathan Meades' new collection Museum Without Walls and found that it also has an essay on Nairn.

He says:

Nairn belonged to a literary generation that abhorred prissiness, that took pride in being bolshie, obstreperous and unsettling, in upsetting the applecart, in trampling the old cultural solaces - [John] Osborne, Peter Nicholls, Kenneth Tynan, Harold Pinter, Geoffrey Hill, Robin Cook, B.S. Johnson, Simon Raven, John Arden and J.G. Ballard, who shared many of Nairn's preoccupations.

Meades also describes meeting Nairn in 1982 in an attempt to persuade him to write again, but he was too far gone in alcoholism and died of cirrhosis of the liver the following year aged only 52.

According to Rowan Moore a BBC4 documentary on Ian Nairn is also to be broadcast soon.

Ian Nairn: From Leeds into Scotland

Jonathan Glancey profiled the late Tom Nairn in 2010:

Writers and journalists, including JG Ballard, Will Self, Jonathan Meades, Patrick Wright, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp (Private Eye's perennially outraged "Piloti"), as well as a younger generation of commentators such as Owen Hatherley and the mysterious blogger, Ghost of Nairn, have all been influenced one way or another by Nairn, who so wanted everywhere to be different when everywhere was threatening to be the same.

Ghost of Nairn did not last long, but you can see the real thing here as he explores the landscape and townscape through which the Settle & Carlisle passed.

Part 2 is also on Youtube if you want it.