Why Ian Nairn, outspoken critic of postwar modernism, is as relevant as ever

An Englishman, middle aged, portly, in tie and suit, pushes his way through a beery crowd in 1970s Munich. The young Germans in the post‑hippy uniform of jeans and straggly facial hair and, swaying, yelping, slurrily intoning a sort of festive yodel, with a note of rising mockery, momentarily engulf him. He reappears, is furious, almost in tears of loathing. "Disgusting," he spits. "This for me is just animal."

The man is Ian Nairn, the writer and broadcaster on places and buildings, and he is appearing in a BBC film in which he traces the route of the Orient Express, which was then a not-yet-re-glamorised trail across a divided continent. He stops at places of interest – hence the visit to a bierfest in Munich – to deliver the passionate, pithy, eloquent observations that made him famous. His name might now (although he would hate this) be called a brand – he wrote books called Nairn's London and Nairn's Paris, as if he owned the cities, and his TV series were called Nairn at Large and Nairn's Travels. "Enter Nairn" announced this newspaper in 1964, when the writer joined the staff of the Observer.

Nairn crystallised revolt against the misapplication of modernist architecture to postwar reconstruction, against the unthinking erasure of town and country by road building, bureaucratic procedure and patronising planning. In his urgings against sprawl, and for what would later be called "compact cities", he anticipates the theories of both Richard Rogers and Prince Charles.

He tried hard, for a while, to find good in new architecture and he continued to admire some, such as Sir Denys Lasdun's National Theatre. But his patience ran out, and in 1966 his exasperation commanded the front of the Observer's Review. "Stop the architects now" was the headline; "The outstanding and appalling fact about modern architecture," he announced, "is that it is not good enough." The public, he said, "see the architect as a wet kind of nuisance, fingering his bow-tie on the edge of real life".

In another Observer article, "Twenty threatened towns", Nairn listed "national assets now in danger" from planners and developers. One was Gravesend, Kent, dear to Nairn, the "most individual town on the Thames estuary", but also "a poor, shattered place", "being transformed from a tough, close-knit pattern of cottages to a drab architect's exercise in slabs of flats".

To go there now is to see what he loved, what he feared, and Nairn's continued importance. It is still tough, descending to the broad, industrial, concrete-edged river, not the sort of place people have in mind when they call its county the garden of England. It still has close-knit quarters, and charming uphill-winding streets that, if they were in Hampstead, would be the homes of bankers. It has the Doric town hall that Nairn admired, and its old cast-iron pier, but it also has senseless holes punched out of it, to make car parks, a civic centre and the slabs that he lamented.

Some of this damage is from Nairn's time. There is also evidence of the reaction that he helped inspire, towards preservation of historic fabric and human-scaled streets, but not in a way he would have liked – metalwork announces you are entering a "heritage quarter", a pedestrian zone that tacitly gives licence to destruction outside its boundary. Then there is more recent development, which seems to have un-learned most of what he fought for. Apartment blocks miserably fail to make the most of their grand waterside location, as does tokenistic landscaping.

Other flats, using terracotta panels faintly inspired by the work of Renzo Piano, rise next to the slabs that Nairn hated, multiplying their discordance. Then, at its edge, the town dissolves into traffic engineering and retail sheds, an update on the formless landscape that, in the 1950s, he called "subtopia".

Nairn defended the particularities of place, people's right to inhabit their localities as they wish, and the beauty and character in the spaces around us. He raged against the destructive collusion of corporations and government. Gravesend, as do most British towns, shows that these battles still need to be fought. In the shadow of Blair's third way, in which we are still living, such collusions are more powerful than ever, which is why interest in Nairn is now resurgent.

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His name faded after his death in 1983, and to the disgust of his fans an otherwise knowledgeable writer and teacher on architecture quite recently referred to him as "someone called Ian Nairn", but now he is being well and truly rediscovered. Young writers such as Owen Hatherley are inspired by the furious honesty of Nairn's outsider voice. Another, older writer, Jonathan Meades, has never let the flame die. This month, the resurgence is marked by a book, Ian Nairn: Words in Place, by Gillian Darley and David McKie, with contributions by Hatherley, Meades and other believers, and a BBC4 programme about him is on the way.

Born in Bedford in 1930 and raised in Frimley, Surrey, Nairn, the driver of a Morris Minor, was not the type to have LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, but these words define the two peaks or poles of his output. HATE was Outrage, a special edition of the Architectural Review, republished as a book, produced by Nairn when he was 24. LOVE was Nairn's London, 11 years later, a document of devotion, "a record of what has moved me," as he put it, "between Uxbridge and Dagenham".

Outrage was "less of a warning than prophecy of doom", an assault on "the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern". According to Outrage, "the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton". To prove his point, Nairn drove from one to the other, and took photographs of their similar-looking peripheries – identical concrete lamp-posts, rows of semi-detacheds, wires, telegraph poles, the odd tree. He coined subtopia to describe his enemy, which Outrage defines as "making an ideal of suburbia".

Outrage had impact. It was debated in parliament and the Duke of Edinburgh talked of subtopia in a speech. It prompted the creation of an organisation, the Civic Trust, to counter the threats it described. It propelled Nairn to fame. It was an early, memorable document of the reaction, which would last a generation and more, to the mid-century beliefs that development, road building and technology would automatically be beneficent, and that we could trust wise men in authority to direct them to our greatest good.

If Outrage showed what not to do, and was concerned with the rural as much as the urban, Nairn's London described what made a city great. It gave flesh to Nairn's statement that "there is only one real rule, that each place has its own nature, its genius loci". It was avowedly personal, in contrast with the dry fact-gathering of Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series of guidebooks. It had "no barriers. I just don't believe in the difference between high and low brow, between aristocracy and working class, between fine art and fine engineering". All that mattered was "the golden thread of true quality". So it combines the best-known monuments, such as Westminster Abbey, with places such as the premises of Mallinson's timber merchants and a gas board building, both in the East End, 27 different pubs, the Agapemonite church in Clapton and Hall Place, a Tudor-plus-Stuart stately home in Bexley, Kent. These places have above all individuality, which in his own person Nairn brought to the level of performance art. He delivered a TV broadcast from the pulpit of condemned church in Bolton; in interviewing a secretary he asked only one question, which was whether she knew where Middlesbrough was; he would answer the phone by saying "woof, woof", or "Chartres cathedral, south aisle, this is Death speaking".

The power of Nairn, in London, Outrage and in all his best work, was in his observation, his courage and his language. He had the gift of the potent image, making buildings and places animate or human. A church in Stratford is "one of the hungriest-looking in London"; one in Leyton is "as diverse as the characters in a saloon bar". Or physical, sensual, in motion: a modern and a classical building in St James's are "as inseparable as Guinness and oysters"; in Highgate cemetery, "with a shock like a blood-curdling scream, the Egyptian entrance rises up"; a church in the docks is "a hard punch to the guts". With the multi-style architecture of London Zoo, "everything is happening at once, like a film projector gone crazy".

He evokes appetite and disgust, and after comparing a polychromatic Victorian church somewhat queasily to an orgasm, he detumesces thus: "Why boggle, when there are a hundred ways of reaching God?" Of the strangely mannered Milner Square in Islington he writes: "Not to be missed, in the sense that you should try Fernet-Branca at least once… as near to expressing evil as a design can be." One ancient site has "a quality of picturesqueness rather like one of those deep-frozen American dinners". Places, for Nairn, were things you could swallow and could swallow you.

He is moral, too. The synagogue at Bevis Marks has "the force of undisturbed goodness", Barking railway station is "one of the noblest new buildings in London" and St Cyprian's, near Baker Street, is "a sunburst of white and gold and all-embracing love… the moment you go in through the door you know that everything is absolutely right". Westminster's Roman Catholic cathedral, on the other hand, "shows the difference between actually being, and trying very–hard-to-be", the work of an architect "who never found himself".

Reputation counted for nothing. In Nairn's London, he puts square brackets around buildings which he feels he has to mention, but doesn't like, such as William Morris's Red House, and the Royal Festival Hall. Elsewhere, he would call the revered church of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich "neurotic and inconsistent", but "it is old, big, and has a lot of carving on it, and so the fatal fog of antiquarian complacency gains a bit more ground in the city which of all places needs less of it". Norwich, he felt, was "on a steady, complacent slide down to vacuity", its best building after its cathedral being Jarrold's paper factory.

Nairn's instincts, to me at least, are almost always right, both in picking out underrated gems such as Deptford's Edwardian town hall and Eric Lyons's 1960s Span housing, and in assailing the over-praised Sir Edwin Lutyens as "unbearably giggly… you want to give his precocious bottom a good clout".

His common themes are a passion for passion, for character, distinctiveness, contrast and surprise, for the unselfconscious and the visceral, and a matching loathing for the statistical, the phoney, the cold, the tepid, the routine, the indifferent and for what he called the "prettification" of places, some of which happened in misguided response to his rages in Outrage.

His favourite images included one of Ostia, near Rome, where hay was grown and mown alongside ancient ruins, and one – as an example of absurd official pedantry – of a British road sign that commanded NO OVERTAKING FOR 223 YARDS EXCEPT OF PEDAL CYCLES IN SINGLE FILE. He loved life as it is lived or, more precisely, mineral evidence of such life, for he was diffident, and once admitted that he found new places "I am sorry to say" more interesting and subtle than meeting new human beings. When he toured America, in conscious emulation of On the Road, he appears to have minimised the chance human encounters that are the core of Kerouac's book.

At his core seems to have been a love of a version of Britain defended in the war and let down by the peace. Nairn was too young to fight, but he joined the RAF in the early 50s, flew jets over the landscapes he would champion in Outrage and, until he lost his pilot's licence in 1966, after failing a medical, he continued to use flying as an aid to research and photography. His other territories of investigation were pubs, which he frequently describes, and beer. Nairn's London ends with a postscript on the state of the city's brewing, "a telling microcosm" where "individual tastes have been swallowed up by mass-produced flavours".

This helps explain his detestation in Munich, which was not because he hated drinking – he loved it more than life itself – but because his religion was being profaned and the fact that he was in Germany would have added an edge to his feelings. "Always," said Nairn of architecture, the point was "not the what but the how" and here the how was all wrong.

Beer was a gathering deluge on Nairn's life, a blot ever expanding like a figure of mortality. It appears early in playful, affectionate asides on drink and pubs, which he later described as places "to shake off loneliness without being in anyone's company". In due course, colleagues would note that he was "wonderful" to work with "before lunch". One of his BBC directors found that he knew on which side of the Thames the pubs opened earlier and wanted shooting schedules adapted accordingly. In 1970 his second wife Judy, proposing a collaboration with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, wrote that "beer money (literally!) would be splendid". At the end of the decade Nairn's universe was almost all beer, pints and pints of it, consumed at the patriotically named St George's Tavern in Pimlico. It cost him his last job at the Sunday Times and, just short of his 53rd birthday, his life.

There were limits and contradictions to Nairn's method. His approach was personal and visual, to capture emotional reactions in front of buildings, and record them with literate beauty. He didn't like to talk to architects and planners, out of shyness and to preserve his outsider's integrity, which meant he didn't study much the causes and consequences of design. The price of his visual approach was that it provoked visual responses, such as the prettification that he hated. At a personal level, the price was that it gave him nowhere for his writing to go, except repetition of his responses in new locations (the Sunday Times would fly him to Tokyo, Hawaii and Sydney) or silence.

Nairn, in his raincoat and Morris Minor, was an unlikely Icarus. He flew, he burned, he drowned. As alcoholism is now recognised as a disease, we should perhaps simply say that that is what killed him, but it might also be possible to guess that, in asking architecture to fill an emotional void, he was seeking the impossible. Also, that, in wanting officialdom to feel as intensely about places as he did, he was doomed to disappointment. But anyone who cares even slightly about their surroundings should be intensely grateful for his attempt.

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