CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 37 IAN WRAY Nairn’s Liverpool revisited The architecture critic Ian Nairn was in love with Liverpool’s architectural inheritance in the 1960s, and we can imagine what he would make of the city’s controversies today. When Ian Nairn visited Liverpool in the 1960s, he found the city in an optimistic and creative maelstrom1. There were 250 beat groups; the Beatles were becoming an international sensation; Mersey poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri had written a bestselling anthology2; and in the visual arts, the city hosted the annual John Moores Exhibition for contemporary visual art. In this, as in other new cultural arenas, Liverpool led the country, if not the world, for London’s galleries had shown little interest in young contemporary artists. Visiting US beat poet Allen Ginsberg claimed that Liverpool was the centre of consciousness of the human universe. ‘I think Allen believed the centre of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the time,’ quipped Liverpool poet Brian Patten. Liverpool was even into acid before the Americans. Years ahead of popular opinion, Nairn was in love with Liverpool’s architectural inheritance, in the city’s still soot-encrusted Victorian and Georgian architecture, as much as its amazing rising site. Many cities, such as London, New York and Manchester, are on flat sites. In Liverpool, coming away from the waterfront, development sits in tiers on the sandstone ridge just inland from the Mersey estuary. The centre 1 Ian Nairn (1967) Britain’s Changing Towns, BBC, was republished in 2017, introduced and edited by Owen Hatherly, Notting Hill Editions. 2 The Mersey Sound (2007 edition) Penguin Books. Terraced houses in Canning Street, built in the 1830s, with the Anglican Cathedral beyond (Photo: Peter de Figueiredo)
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