ABSTRACT
The Architectural Review (AR) had become firmly established as the voice of authority in British architecture in the years before the Second World War. Its role in shaping the development of a modernist culture in British architecture in the 1930s was crucial, and provided an interpretation of modernism that shaped its translation into the making of buildings in the years that followed. Led by Ian Nairn, who had joined the AR staff in 1954, it reflected the manifold failures of the ad hoc modernisation of postwar Britain. Architects were not those under attack here, but rather public authorities, whether town councils, suppliers of utilities, the army or simply those insensitive to environmental degradation who allowed this visual pollution to happen. Thus it was again a fight on behalf of an acute visual sensibility; but it also implied a plea for a different, denser urbanism that allied the campaign both to Townscape issues and to its criticism of suburban development.
