Ian Nairn (1930-1983) was a hugely influential and pugnacious architectural critic, inventor of the crushing term 'subtopia' and central to the growth of the British conservation movement. He co-wrote with Nikolaus Pevsner the Sussex volume in the Buildings of England series. London was his great obsession and Nairn's London his lasting monument. He once paid his wife the compliment of stating that she 'would certainly have been in Nairn's London had she only been made of brick or stucco'.

A masterpiece ... Nairn was a poet ... Nairn's London belongs to no genre save its own, it is of a school of one ... There is barely a page which does not contain some startling turn of phrase