Who was Ian Nairn?

"Before Jane Jacobs, before James Howard Kunstler, before David Sucher, there was Ian Nairn. Much of what's best in his writings is his sensitivity to streets, to ensembles, to juxtapositions, to places--the whole panoply of what we call urbanism. And Nairn is, more than any architecture critic I've ever read, attuned to and ready to describe how places affect all the five senses."

from an enthusiastic blog post a few years back.

Given that there are only a limited number of us Nairns in the world, my curiosity is peaked a little when I come across the name. I've seen Ian Nairn referenced a few times in urbanist discussions, but all of his books are out of print and not available at any of the libraries around here.

He is known for his delight in cities, particularly London, that maintain their unique characteristics and traditional sense of place. He named the post WWII urge toward a global monotony subtopia, and spent the later years of his short life wielding a pen against it. Yet, on the other hand, he appears to have come out in favor of modernist architecture in general. A little puzzling to me.

I'll have to keep my eyes open for his name in the future.