2016 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Nairn's London, widely considered the quintessential — if highly opinionated — guidebook to our city. To mark the occasion, we rootled through our copy and dug out some of our favourite quotes.
Just as topographical London is a vast 20-mile saucer of people with a rim of low hills, so human London is a central goulash with its rightful inhabitants forming an unfashionable rim. — London
Sheer horror: a Francis Bacon shriek in the affluent, uncomplicated surroundings... It looks like a normal St John's Wood villa pickled in embalming fluid by some mad doctor. — 12 Langford Place, St John's Wood
This is the one City church that you must go in. By comparison almost all Baroque churches on the Continent seem overloaded and hysterical. — St Mary Woolnoth
Unlike many of London's traditional ceremonies , this is a blatant tourist-trap, neither better nor worse than a Soho strip-tease club. — Horse Guards
It is the opposite of a firework; it smoulders through to your consciousness with quiet intensity... This building is meant to be used and worn and thumbed over and hugged, like the family's big wooly dog. — Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore
A poor third to the National Gallery and the Tate. It is an overwhelming, suffocating display of expensive 19th century taste. With all the gilded clocks and boiseries it feels exactly like a provincial French museum. — The Wallace Collection
The new facades will be complete by the time this book appears, and so the unsuspected tragedy has come full circle. — Royal Festival Hall
A vast throbbing hangar; the phrase needs to be repeated 16 times to make enough weight in the book and convey the overwhelming solid force of this beginning or end to journeys. — St Pancras station
The shape is the building, a point made straight away by comparison with the clever fribble on the front of St Pancras, next door. — King's Cross station
If man does not blow himself up, he might in the end act at all times and on all levels with the complete understanding of this room" — the breakfast room, John Soane's House
Victorian wildness can come from half a dozen causes... But this is truly demoniac, an Edgar Allen Poe of a building. It is the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare. — 33-5 Eastcheap
The whole thing could float off down the Thames as Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel combined. — Selfridges
As anything more than an area on a map, Bloomsbury is dead. Town planners and London University have killed it between them – a notably academic victory — Bloomsbury
One of those structures which make the whole complicated process of designing look absurdly easy. — Waterloo Bridge
Lord Leighton's house has the wholeness and excitement which is so conspicuously absent from his paintings. — Leighton House
In daylight, the romantic aspirations never get off the ground: this detail was meant to be taken seriously, like Wagner. But at night it is magnificent... one of those high points which lose nothing through being frankly melodramatic. — Tower Bridge
And the elephant on one of the corners has a backside just like a businessman scrambling under a restaurant table for his cheque-book. — Albert Memorial
Chelsea is only relatively remarkable. — Chelsea
Earls Court is a hippopotamus in the water hole, rearing up above West London, that ought to have grass all over it. — Earls Court
Not to be missed, in the sense that you ought to try Fernet Branca at least once. — Milner Square, Islington
No need to go to Leningrad. Come to Woolwich instead, and see the yellow brick march out for a quarter of a mile or more. — Woolwich Barracks
A bitter irony has put the headquarters of the RIBA in Portland Place. For all the streets in London it is the one which has been most stupidly and selfishly and blindly ruined by 20th century RIBA members — velly professional, velly respected, oh yes. — RIBA
It is always four o'clock in late November here, but in the same positive way as in Peter Grimes. -- Beddington Lane
Nothing seems real but death at its greyest and clammiest. The cemetery closes well before dark, and a good job too. — Highgate Cemetery
