'To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone." Well, yes; Kenneth Ross, the incumbent of All Saints, Margaret Street, at the time might well have turned puce at the thought. "Yet," continued Ian Nairn, writing in the mid-1960s of William Butterfield's intense Gothic Revival church built a century earlier, "this building can only be understood in terms of compelling passion. Here is the force of Wuthering Heights translated into dusky red and black bricks, put down in a mundane Marylebone street to rivet you, pluck you into the courtyard with its hard welcoming wings and quivering steeple."  This provocative entry from Nairn's London, published by Penguin in 1966, jumps from the page, as did much of Nairn's sharp-shadowed and beautifully written journalism and books. He made his debut in 1955 with "Outrage", an iconoclastic and hugely influential issue of the Architectural Review, and spent his ember days at Harry Evans's Sunday Times in the late 1970s. Sadly, in his last five years, Nairn, one of the greatest of all topographical writers, wrote little or nothing. He gave up a welcoming newspaper office in Bloomsbury for the public bar of St George's Tavern, Pimlico, where he sank a fatal tide of Guinness. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 52.  This was in 1983, and I was lucky enough to meet him that year when I was a young assistant editor with the AR. I say "lucky", but the writer I met was a pale shadow of the "outraged" Nairn of the mid-1950s. I was too late.  Jonathan Meades, the writer and television presenter, had been to see Nairn some months earlier, in the St George's Tavern, in the vain hope of getting this influential, yet largely forgotten, literary figure to write for Tina Brown's Tatler.  "It was like watching someone dissolve in front of your eyes," says Meades. "I've seldom seen a less healthy looking person. His lunch was 14 pints of beer. He looked dropsical. It was as if his whole career had been a graph of disillusionment, and all that was left was an abyss."  Nairn's decline and fall might well seem strange if all we knew of him was a list of his undoubted achievements. A brilliant "angry young man" whose searing "outrage" quickly turned into a book that won the hearts of newspapers from the Daily Mirror to the Manchester Guardian, was published a year before John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Nairn went on to write for the Daily Telegraph, the Observer and the Sunday Times, and presented a long run of heart-on-sleeve films for the BBC in the 60s and 70s. A tireless traveller through Britain and across Europe, Australia and the United States, he co-authored the Surrey (1962) and Sussex (1965) volumes of Nikolaus Pevsner's indispensable Buildings of England series, and was a guiding spirit among the younger generation that continued the crusade for conservation in the footsteps of another former AR assistant editor, John Betjeman.  Nairn had been a champion of modern architecture when he joined the AR, with its picturesque offices in Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster, in 1954. Within a decade, though, he was struggling to find new buildings worthy of the new Britain he had so wanted to believe in when he took up journalism after a three-year spell in the RAF, flying Gloster Meteor jet fighters after national service.  He made his instant mark with "Outrage", a fearless and revelatory attack on what was fast becoming the unbridled banality of Britain's landscape and "townscape", as the AR labelled the art of the way we should be making our towns and cities. For Nairn and the AR, a journey, by Morris Minor, from Southampton to Carlisle said it all. He forged a word for what he saw: Subtopia – "its symptom will be that 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." And the outrage? "The Outrage is that the whole land surface is becoming covered by the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns ... Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern."  This could have been William Cobbett riding his hobby-horse across southern England: "All Middlesex is ugly," he thundered in 1830 in one of the pugnacious chapter openings of Rural Rides. Much the same theme had been taken up by John Ruskin, John Betjeman, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who gave us Portmeirion in north Wales, and Thomas Sharp, a 20th-century town planner who believed that postwar modern architecture and development could be reconciled with the humane ideal – felt by Nairn in the bones of his burly frame – of compact towns co-existing with a truly green countryside of which we are stewards, not consumers or despoilers.  "You have to remember," says Meades, "that when Nairn wrote "Outrage", building licences [along with ration books], had only just been repealed. So, in some ways Nairn was hoping for, and writing about, something that didn't exist, anticipating a utopian revelation from a new generation of architects who weren't even building. And, when they did, he found himself scratching about for what was good, and couldn't find it."  "Outrage", however, brought the 25-year-old Nairn to the attention of Fleet Street. As new buildings and planning disappointed him, so he turned to the world of books, journalism and television, and away from architects themselves. He had no architectural background or training, nor any intention of becoming a historian of the high-minded school of Kenneth Clark, John Summerson or John Pope-Hennessy. Journalism, travel and pubs were much more his thing.  Born in Bedford in August 1930, he was the son of an engineering draughtsman working on the government-sponsored R101 dirigible, a titanic airship designed by VC Richmond at the Royal Airship Works at nearby Cardington. The R101 crashed in France on its maiden voyage in October 1930. The family moved to Frimley, a small Surrey town of the kind parodied by Betjeman. Nairn lived here until he went to Birmingham University to study maths before taking to the skies with the RAF.  Perhaps he had seen Britain's towns sprawling, its countryside under threat from the vantage point of his Meteor jet. On the ground, he set architectural journalism ablaze. Within weeks of the publication of "Outrage", the Duke of Edinburgh was speaking of "Subtopia", while, as Christopher Hurst recalled in his 1997 publishing memoirs, The View from King Street, "Duncan Sandys, the [Tory] Minister of Housing took up the theme, doubtless with some opportunism because the worst 'outrages' emanated from Labour-controlled councils."  Nairn never fitted comfortably into the world of professional men and women, nor that of bureaucrats and politicians. "Professional books on town planning are often of no assistance," he said, "and may be harmful." Instead, he recommended a one-inch Ordnance Survey map and "a pair of uncommitted eyes". Even when the Civic Trust was set up, in 1957, to help tackle "Subtopia", Nairn refused to join. He resembled the character Patrick McGoohan was to play, 10 years later, in the TV drama The Prisoner: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own." As was his writing.  "Space here," he wrote of Nicholas Hawskmoor's Portland stone bulldog of a protestant prayerbox, St Mary Woolnoth, "is made so tangible that you can experience for the price of a bus ticket to the City the super-reality of the mystics, or mescalin ..." Of the finely poised juxtaposition of Denys Lasdun's 26 St James's Place, built in 1959, and John Vardy and "Athenian" Stuart's Spencer House (1754), Nairn observed that these "totally dissimilar" buildings were as "inseparable as Guinness and oysters".  Nairn's great contribution to architectural and topographical writing and broadcasting is that he took his audiences to the most unexpected places and buildings. His exhaustive, revelatory itinerary of Britain was as much concerned with the City of London as it was with Uxbridge or Dagenham, Northampton or Stockport.  On film, you catch something of his abiding melancholy, along with his habitual scruffiness and a haunting sense that here was a man as much in search of himself as he was of the inspired new architecture that eluded him. And in search, too, of a romantic, everyday Britain that, from Millwall to Manchester, was vanishing under a tide of crude public and private development. Those falling cadences, the way his sentences drop quietly into ideas left hanging, things unsaid, are as haunting as they are disturbing. There was an ineffable sadness at work. Nairn truly detested the way we were selling (as we continue to) our landscape, our townscapes, for a mess of nothing worth looking at, much less living in or handing down to our children. He and Judy remained childless; he didn't much see the point of bringing children into a subtopian world.  "He was a great Fleet Street colleague," says Brian Jackson, the travel writer and ecologist who shared an office with him at the Sunday Times from 1970. "He was large, genial and unkempt, squeezed into a cheap suit that he must have slept in. A white shirt always, top button undone with a loose, off-centre tie. He tootled around the country in his Morris, came back to The Blue Lion in Gray's Inn Road, sank several pints and hand-wrote his stories. No one changed a word. He was indulged because he was good, one of Harry Evans's inspired mavericks, and encouraged, as we all were, to write to our enthusiasms. Hard to imagine today."  Ian Jack, another of Nairn's Sunday Times colleagues, recalls: "Ian was funny. He'd answer the phone saying things like 'Weasel, Stoat and Polecat', as if he were some pompous provincial solicitor. Sometimes he'd answer the phone with a bark – woof, woof! Perhaps it was the drink. He had the seasoned drinker's habit of gripping his pint from the bottom of the glass. Not a delicate drinker. He was shy, ruminative and kind, and always looked sad. On TV you heard that catch in the voice, saw those watery eyes ..."  According to Jackson, Nairn said hewanted to be buried under the flightpath into Heathrow. "Then, sometime in the late 70s, he pressed the self-destruct button." Nairn is indeed buried under the flightpath at Heathrow, in a hard-to-find grave in Hanwell cemetery, alongside the roaring Uxbridge Road. His spirit, however, is very much abroad, and we need it today, as one "outrage" follows another.  Writers and journalists, including JG Ballard, Will Self, Jonathan Meades, Patrick Wright, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp (Private Eye's perennially outraged "Piloti"), as well as a younger generation of commentators such as Owen Hatherley and the mysterious blogger, Ghost of Nairn, have all been influenced one way or another by Nairn, who so wanted everywhere to be different when everywhere was threatening to be the same.  • Jonathan Glancey's series of films in the footsteps of Ian Nairn, Outrage Revisited, begins on Wednesday 19 May 2010 at guardian.co.uk/architecture.
Jonathan Glancey: His attacks on the banality of Britain's postwar buildings made Ian Nairn an inspiration for a generation of architectural critics