C O N T E X T 1 3 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 5 51 went straight to pages 29–33 to see what information is given about SirWilliam Tite (no relation). He is cited as the third of a short list of ‘bold and enterprising’ Victorian pioneers, the others being Philip Hardwick and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.These are followed by a dozen slightly less famous figures from the 19th century. Each of these biographies sets out the works done for various railway companies and the main stations and architectural styles used. I next looked up stations that have meant much to me in the course of a lifetime’s travel, currently focused on Euston and Chester via Crewe (not mentioned). Euston is given more space than any of the other great London termini, due not least to its pivotal position in the annals of UK conservation after the 1961 demolition of the Euston Arch. Euston is London’s doorway to other great cities (Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Dublin via the Holyhead ferry) but currently it consists of a riotous village of food, drink and retail outlets, accompanied by chaotic transfers to the underground, taxis and buses. A modern labour of Hercules awaits the designers and constructors of a worthwhile replacement for this undignified confusion. I sought references to Barking Station. I can not remember the 1909 station buildings where surface trains from Essex met the London underground, for in 1959 they were replaced by a new booking hall. But I was old enough to take notice of JohnWard’s clean and neatly detailed clerestory, concrete roof and canopy over the beautifully scaled street level concourse. It was hailed by Pevsner in Essex (1965) and later listed. Parissien’s book points out how Barking represents an early UK response to Rome’s main railway station, which had been rebuilt in 1947–50 to international acclaim during Italy’s re-emergence from wartime damage. Stations like Rome or its small Essex progeny are memorable both architecturally and because they remind us of journeys, partings, long waits, rushed departures or idle hours spent watching the crowds just to check out how people look and behave. Readers of The English Railway Station can use its index, as I did, to see how many of the station names they recognise.These include surviving examples, demolition sites and numerous stations that have undergone changes of use. Among these I notedTunbridge WellsWest (1866, listed and converted to a burger restaurant) and Petworth (rebuilt in timber in 1892, now the site of a memorable bed-and-breakfast establishment). Users of the index will also search for favourites that have been omitted, such as Hanwell (1838/1875), a stop on the GreatWestern between Ealing and theWharncliff Viaduct crossing the Brent. The book is generally optimistic about preservation and there are many references to recent improvements at stations in railway use with grant support from the Railway Heritage Trust. GrahamTite is a conservation officer working under contract Outrage and celebration Ian Nairn: words in place Gillian Darley and David McKie, Five Leaves Publications, 2013, paperback, 162 pages, illustrated, ISBN 978 1 907869 87 7, £10.99 ‘He comes ambling down a grim alleyway, a picture of awkwardness, in a suit which doesn’t quite fit and a drablooking tie, his hair adrift, his hands in his pockets, his expression located somewhere on the slope down from melancholy to lugubrious. He rarely smiles and, if he does, the smile is brief and conditional.When he starts to speak, he sounds almost apologetic.Very few in the history of the trade can ever have looked less like a TV personality.’ That was Ian Nairn as a TV presenter of buildings and places, described in Gillian Darley’s and David McKie’s exemplary short biography.The story they tell ends with him dying of drink at the age of 52, but on the way he changed the way in which many people looked at buildings and places. Ian Nairn’s first job, in the early 1950s, was as a pilot in the RAF.The experience of seeing Britain from the air sparked his fascination with places and what made them special.When he decided that his vocation was as a writer on architecture, his aerial perspective alerted him to how ‘subtopian’ development, as he called it, was blighting the landscape. In his early years as a writer he used to hire a plane to make aerial site-viewings. Later he stuck to the Morris Minor that featured in his television programmes. What makes Nairn such an engaging writer is his emotional reaction to buildings and places. Gordon Cullen, who illustrated many of Nairn’s articles, noted that he ‘wore his emotions the way most people wear varicose veins’. This suggests that those emotions were not always pleasant to witness. Nairn himself wrote that he had ‘the emotions of a three year old’, suggesting tantrums and an unwillingness to bow to the opinions of others. He excelled at outrage – ‘Outrage’ being the title of the 1955 special issue of the Architectural Review (on whose staff he was) highlighting the failure of planning. ‘Nairn intended offence and he gave it, head-on,’ Darley and McKie write. He loved just as passionately: architects, ancient and modern, who were individual and genuine (John Nash was a favourite); places that showed signs of having been shaped and inhabited by people who had a spark of life; flying; travel; and beer. ‘My job as a critic of buildings,’ Nairn wrote, ‘is to be ready to respond to anything real that comes along in any of its thousand ways, and to experience it according to its own nature, so that it is at worst illuminated and comprehended, and at best transmitted like electricity, because the job within my job is to render back what I have felt and enjoyed.’ A natural journalist, Nairn was also enough of a scholar to have written the Surrey volume of Pevsner’s The Buildings of England and part of the Sussex one. Nikolaus Pevsner particularly admired his sensitivity to landscape and townscape. ‘He writes better than I could ever hope John Nash, Ian Nairn’s favourite architect
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