Monday, October 30, 2006
Nairn's London
I had to get this book from Amazon. I am a great fan of Jonathan Meades and enjoy his television programmes. One commentator compared him to Ian Nairn. I recalled Nairn's Travels (BBC TV*) and was entertained by the fact that someone can go into a any town centre and make it into a televisual feast of people, place and buildings.
Ian died into apparent obscurity at the age of 52, leaving behind a small legacy of work. One of which was Nairn's London. I was pleased I bought it. It is bedtime reading - not airport. The book is loosely structured around area and zones and certain building are arbitrarily selected, but the book is great fun.
I love the following comment about the The Spaniard's Inn in Hampstead
Hampstead pubs are usually not much fun: they are like a private society whose performance is not worth the entrance fee - the intellectual equivalent of the Soho strip-tease club. But The Spaniards, at the very top end of the Heath, gets a solid butt from its cockncy visitors, at least in fine weather. The mixture shakes down very well; the warren of dark rooms, the big gardens, and this mingling of ages and classes make it more like a German beer-garden than anywhere else I know in London. The atmosphere has all grown together, just like the slap-happy brick and weatherboard walls of the pub. 'I'he one thing which will kill it is wholesale redecoration. Good beer, the serious drinker's standby in foreign parts: Draught Bass and Worthington E.
The Spaniards would be a memorable place anyway: opposite the pub is a small square tollhouse, now a splendid obstruction. It reduces a busy London cross-route to a single car-width at a blind bend. The road all of a sudden, is not everything: and so far from being wished away in the name of progress, local opinion wants to keep it. The cars, ,T course, sort it all out, as they will if they are given the chance and not beaten into bloody-minded truculence with too many rules.'
The Spaniards has kept its atmosphere, its tollhouse and its Draught Bass.
You also have a description of thee Crown and Greyhound, South of the River in Dulwich Village
Think of all the things which you have been told don't wrought iron, leaded lights, plastic flowers, olde woodwork, whole lot in a big Victorian pub and you have a masterpiece _
entirely to the superb life and taste (true taste, not 'good arranger - surely in this case the landlord or landlady. It is an act of love, it bursts out all over - and has the same reverberating effect an untouched nineteenth-century pub, because it is set off by a similar gusto. The reflections, the intricacy, the richness and depth, are all there, achieved by means which are normally attached to gentility. It is a wonderful place to be in, which is enough; but it is also a wonderful torch to carry through the dark alleys of self-consciousness and academism. Really be your real self, like this, and nothing can go wrong. There is a mirror here with leaded lights on it...
Brilliant stuff, must embark on a similar before I hand in my dinner pail
Ian died into apparent obscurity at the age of 52, leaving behind a small legacy of work. One of which was Nairn's London. I was pleased I bought it. It is bedtime reading - not airport. The book is loosely structured around area and zones and certain building are arbitrarily selected, but the book is great fun.
I love the following comment about the The Spaniard's Inn in Hampstead
Hampstead pubs are usually not much fun: they are like a private society whose performance is not worth the entrance fee - the intellectual equivalent of the Soho strip-tease club. But The Spaniards, at the very top end of the Heath, gets a solid butt from its cockncy visitors, at least in fine weather. The mixture shakes down very well; the warren of dark rooms, the big gardens, and this mingling of ages and classes make it more like a German beer-garden than anywhere else I know in London. The atmosphere has all grown together, just like the slap-happy brick and weatherboard walls of the pub. 'I'he one thing which will kill it is wholesale redecoration. Good beer, the serious drinker's standby in foreign parts: Draught Bass and Worthington E.
The Spaniards would be a memorable place anyway: opposite the pub is a small square tollhouse, now a splendid obstruction. It reduces a busy London cross-route to a single car-width at a blind bend. The road all of a sudden, is not everything: and so far from being wished away in the name of progress, local opinion wants to keep it. The cars, ,T course, sort it all out, as they will if they are given the chance and not beaten into bloody-minded truculence with too many rules.'
The Spaniards has kept its atmosphere, its tollhouse and its Draught Bass.
You also have a description of thee Crown and Greyhound, South of the River in Dulwich Village
Think of all the things which you have been told don't wrought iron, leaded lights, plastic flowers, olde woodwork, whole lot in a big Victorian pub and you have a masterpiece _
entirely to the superb life and taste (true taste, not 'good arranger - surely in this case the landlord or landlady. It is an act of love, it bursts out all over - and has the same reverberating effect an untouched nineteenth-century pub, because it is set off by a similar gusto. The reflections, the intricacy, the richness and depth, are all there, achieved by means which are normally attached to gentility. It is a wonderful place to be in, which is enough; but it is also a wonderful torch to carry through the dark alleys of self-consciousness and academism. Really be your real self, like this, and nothing can go wrong. There is a mirror here with leaded lights on it...
Brilliant stuff, must embark on a similar before I hand in my dinner pail
