Ian Nairn was a former Royal Air Force pilot with no architecture qualifications. In 1955 Nairn coined the term Subtopia to describe his prophetic vision of an architecturally homogenised Britain. In the 1960s Nairn contributed to Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series and published Nairn's London and Nairn's Paris. In the 1970s Nairn moved into television, producing Nairn's Travels and Nairn Across Britain for the BBC. A noted drinker, Nairn's work is full of descriptions of pubs and recommendations for beers. He died in 1983 aged 53.Owen Hatherley is a London-based writer and journalist writing primarily on architecture, politics and culture. Hatherley has written for Building Design, the Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review and Socialist Worker. His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism". Hatherly's book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.

"Once you discover [Nairn] you want to read everything he’s written."

• CONTENTS Well worth a boggle - an introduction to Ian Nairn 1 Birmingham 2 Superlative Newcastle-upon-Tyne 3 Canterbury: the happy city 4 Patrician Manchester 5 Glasgow and Cumbernauld New Town 6 Llanidloes, the Pocket Metropolis 7 Exciting Possibilities of Modern Sheffield 8 Friendly Plymouth 9 The Borough of St Marylebone 10 The wise city of Chester 11 Proud Derry 12 Brighton: model for affluence 13 Cardiff, the Welsh Enigma 14 Liverpool: world city 15 Norwich: regional capital 16 The burghs of Fife Europe's Reconstructed Cities: Introduction 17 Cologne and its Churches 18 Regimented Rotterdam 19 Comfortable Munich 20 Good-natured Milan 21 Three French Towns - Caen, St Malo, Le Havre 22 Zurich