Nairn's towns - Ian Nairn

In this new paperback edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley in 2013 these essays show Nairn writing about cities and towns as wholes rather than as collections of individual buildings. In each of them, there are several things happening at once - assessments of historic townscape, capsule reviews of new buildings, attempts to find the specific character of each place. Hatherley can dish it out with the best of Nairn when it comes to detailing the dreadful regeneration programmes, empty civic boosterism, shoddy shopping malls, PFI hospitals, and cheap volume house-building schemes which have continued to blight these towns and cities since the 1960s, which Nairn presciently anticipated.