The critic who cared too much

Ian Nairn wrote brilliantly about buildings, made glorious TV – and drowned his sorrows too deeply, remembers Jonathan Meades

- Jonathan Meades

Were Ian Nairn to have been alive for his 90th birthday on 15th August, he’d doubtless have celebrated with yet another new liver and several gallons of beer.

But it wasn’t to be. He died a few days before his 53rd birthday in August 1983 – though he seemed all but dead when I met him the previous autumn in St George’s Tavern (pictured), a fag-ash pub in Victoria which he favoured because it was just a short waddle from his flat.

I entertained the vain hope of reviving his career, long since in desuetude – hardly surprising given the volume of liquid punishment he had inflicted on himself. He was a terrible sight. Folds of flesh hung from him as from a Brahman cow with oedema. He looked in need of some form of drainage.

The self-maceration had also done for his mind. He was incoherent and slow – maybe aphasic. He must have known that there was no future save the next pint, and the next, and so on till he swigged the final gulp. That lunchtime, he drank 14 joyless pints while we sort of discussed what he might write and both knew he wouldn’t.

He wasn’t immune to flattery; he simply didn’t acknowledge it. When I referred admiringly to various things he had written and filmed, he seemed mildly baffled, as though he didn’t recognise them. They had, after all, been the achievements of someone who no longer existed. He said he’d think it over.