Travels in Subtopia
Ian Nairn, in the summer of 1955, looked out across England and did not like what he saw, which already marks him as a man of unusual attentiveness, since most of his countrymen had long since trained themselves not to look at all. The result was Outrage, a special number of the Architectural Review later promoted to the dignity of a book, and built — as the best polemics always are — around a single word doing the work of a thousand committees. The word was Subtopia, and like all good inventions it sounds inevitable the moment you hear it, as though it had been waiting in the dictionary all along for someone rude enough to coin it.
The word is a marriage of suburb and utopia, which is to say a marriage nobody quite remembers agreeing to. Nairn’s joke, and it is a bleak one, is that the nation had quietly adopted the suburb as its idea of paradise — not chosen it, exactly, but drifted into it the way one drifts into a second helping of trifle. Utopia was supposed to be the perfect place. Subtopia is the perfect nowhere, achieved not by tyranny or vision but by everybody minding their own small business with tremendous diligence and nobody minding the whole.
His central accusation was that England was being ironed flat. Every place that had once been emphatically itself was being gently coaxed toward a national average of mild, inoffensive, soul-curdling sameness, and Nairn gave this catastrophe its perfect headline: one day, he warned, Southampton would look exactly like Carlisle. Outrage was duly staged as a doomed road trip between the two, a man driving the length of his own country and finding, with mounting horror, that he kept arriving at the same place he had just left. It is the funniest tragedy in the history of town planning, and the punchline is the entire island.
The detail people forget — because it is cleverer than they expect — is that the blurring ran both ways. Nairn was not simply the rural squire bewailing the bulldozer. His complaint was double-barrelled and beautifully even-handed: the countryside was being suburbanised by sprawl, true, but the town was simultaneously being sentimentalised into a sort of municipal meadow, sprouting pointless verges and apologetic shrubs where a self-respecting city ought to present an honest wall of brick. The crime was the fudge. The country was going soft and the town was going coy, and they were meeting, disastrously, somewhere in the middle, in what he called a mean and middling state that was neither one thing nor the other — the architectural equivalent of a man who can’t decide between a hat and no hat and settles for carrying one.
He proved all this not with statistics, which can be argued with, but with photographs, which cannot. Outrage is an inventory of small humiliations: the cat’s-cradle of overhead wires, the pylons striding across the view like uninvited guests, the ribbon development unspooling along every arterial road, the hoardings, the standardised concrete lamp posts breeding in the night, the chain-link, the “improved” grass, the heroic quantities of municipal clutter that no one person ordered and no one person is to blame for. That was rather his point. Subtopia has no author. It is what you get when responsibility is so finely subdivided that each official can prove, with documents, that the mess is somebody else’s department.
His method, naturally, was simply to look, which in the England of 1955 counted as a radical act and possibly a slightly suspect one. This was the house style of the Architectural Review — the “Townscape” creed, with Gordon Cullen sketching away nearby — the conviction that a place should be judged by the disciplined human eye walking through it rather than by the planner’s diagram seen from a helpful altitude of two thousand feet. Nairn walked, and squinted, and was appalled, and made his appalledness contagious.
The cure, when it came, arrived in the sequel — Counter-Attack Against Subtopia (1956), a title that promises rather more gunfire than a magazine about buildings usually delivers. The remedy was bracingly simple and therefore almost impossible: stop fudging. Make the towns properly urban and the country properly wild, declutter without mercy, and draw the line between the two with a firm hand instead of smudging it with good intentions and ornamental cabbages.
What is genuinely remarkable is that the word outlived the man and very nearly outlived the problem, which it certainly did not solve. “Subtopia” lodged itself permanently in the national conversation about what England looks like and whether anyone is in charge of it — which is why it keeps turning up, decades later, whenever someone sits down to write seriously about the rural, the modern, and the slow vanishing of places that used to know exactly where and what they were. Nairn coined a word to stop a thing from happening. The thing happened anyway. But at least, thanks to him, we have always known precisely what to call
