My name’s Ian Nairn, and I am no longer an alcoholic. Hardly surprising, really. You try sinking two gallons o’ beer when you’re non-corporeal, mate — ain’t gonna happen.

Doesn’t matter a damn though that I’m immaterial: ghosts can still see, you know. We can still watch. And what a sorry spectacle it is. All of it.

For 40-odd years, I’ve witnessed London erupt like a slow-motion firework. People from everywhere in the world come here with their spending money and their appalling optimism, and thank God for that at least. The crowds distract from the bland, repetitive absence of any differentiated form whatsoever at street level. Too much glass, too much light, and far too much air for those neat little piles of red-white-and-bleurgh tourist tat. 

In every great city, where once you had bookshops and tobacconists, newsagents and repair shops, pubs of course – tons of pubs* – now it’s these infantilising ‘pop-ups’ and reclaimed railway arches selling ‘pre-loved’ frocks to lasses with more money (and frocks, for that matter) than sense. 

And those great slabs of corporate, internationalised money, squatting in the City where decent counting-houses used to be – they look like graph paper rendered in glass. Stand in the window, mate! Point upwards! You look like a profit forecast! These giant trinkets would have more authenticity if you could turn them upside down and shake them like snowglobes, the snow replaced by a flurrying of bank notes. 

Being a ghost does have its perks, of course. Chief among them is the power of invisibility. You can’t see me, but I can see you. And I am very conscious of the neurotic uncertainty of architects in this weedy, wittering 21st century. Conscious, too, of the general mood within the profession, a sort of glum stoicism. I can’t read yer minds, but I bet you a penny to a guinea watch-chain I know what you’re thinking: what’s it like then, matey, being a ghost? I suppose if you’re a young person with an interesting hairdo and Henry Kissinger spectacles you might yammer on about my ‘lived psychogeographical reality’. Let’s face it: there’d be little I could do to shut you up. 

The question now, as it was then, is: what is to be done? The challenges today are markedly different from those of 1955. The problems of how and where to accommodate the great boiler-rooms of industry — the factories, the foundries, the centres of manufacturing — have largely been solved by their disappearance. The 21st century knows better than to get its hands dirty with honest toil. It’s a damn shame. It really is.

Look at the Olympic Park: 560 acres of showing off, where there used to be paint shops and railway sidings and the Lesney factory. Now what have you got? Basketball, Waitrose and ABBA. There was a lot of claptrap years ago about building some beautiful, affordable housing here; instead we’ve got overpriced, underwhelming bourgeois detention blocks. 

Decent swimming baths, though, if you like that sort of thing, designed by the late Zaha Hadid. I see her around from time to time. Bit stand-offish in her floaty couture, looking down her nose at Muggins here in his Woolworths trousers. (Mark you, I came upon John Madin a few weeks past. A man who has watched his braveries reduced to dust again and again. It wasn’t just his imagination they took a ball and chain to: they demolished that poor man’s heart.)

There is, however, one significant ‘thing’ on the Olympic site. A knotty oxblood sculpture, the largest in the kingdom. The artist is – who cares? I withhold my acknowledgement on principle. It’s a gigantic, ugly mess of metal twisted into an effete nonsense. The sponsor – one of the richest men in the world – I also refuse to name, for this grisly folly was built to his glory alone.

And it now boasts a giant playground slide. Gormless punters desperate to spend even more money can get a lift to the top, have a gander at London’s petrified money all sprawled out before them. Then, when ennui takes hold, they may enter a winding urethral tube that deposits them 40 seconds later to exactly where they started. If that’s not a metaphor for these ridiculous times, I don’t know what is. 

How did we arrive at this preposterous version of ourselves? Well, as they say – gradually, then all at once. It started slowly in post-war Britain, the sluggish clouds of suburbanism drifting over everything, like the noxious smoke of a Turkish cigarette. The urban and the rural, for centuries in mutually suspicious isolation from one another, became hopelessly entangled, like two wrestlers of an ITV Saturday afternoon.

The degradation of both rus and urbs over the last 70 years reads like a cursed Old Testament line of descent …

Urbia begat Suburbia.

Suburbia begat Ruralvania.

Ruralvania begat Nutopia.

Nutopia begat Subtopia.

Subtopia begat South Woodham Ferrers.

Ah, yes, dear old Ferrers, apotheosis of the Essex Design Guide. A town centre dominated by a huge vernacular Asda barn. No hayloft, but furlongs of cheap booze to luxuriate in. A much-maligned housing estate to the south – its streets tweely named after places and characters from Tolkien – was being born just as I was dying. Perhaps those hippie-nutty radical architects in the Sixties were prescient. Perhaps architecture is four-dimensional and may only be understood over time. It’s certainly true that today, South Woodham Ferrers seems to be working pretty well. There’s a decent community spirit, thanks to a legion of second- and third-generation cockney emigrés. And people seem to like living there. 

At least it was designed. It’s a damn sight better than all this pinchbeck rubbish passed off as ‘executive housing,’ growing like fungus around every subtopian outpost in the country. Are there signs that, architecturally at least, things are getting better? You tell me, mate.

The Late Battersea Power Station. An enormous, pointless, mentholated boutique, dancing on the grave of public utility. Designed by Daleks, hidden by Gehry and with a deathless interior dedicated to the patron saint of Anywhere.

The W Hotel, Edinburgh. Architects have always had a mischievous side. After all, what was Post-Modernism if not mooning at the pomposity of the past? Still, Jestico + Whiles set the bar very high indeed by coiling out this steaming deposit in the middle of a World Heritage site.

Then there’s 22 Bishopsgate. As the glaciers at the North Pole continue to shrink, it’s comforting I suppose to see PLP Architecture’s vast icy nothingness rise above the singular streets of London. Squint, and you could be in Dubai, or indeed in any city that celebrates absence in built form.

Doesn’t feel as though we’re a serious country any more, does it? You know, I have howled against the banality and stupidity of almost every blasted thing in Britain since my death in 1983. The meagreness of architectural aspiration. The craven capitulation to these damn vampires sucking the life, the uniqueness out of absolutely everywhere. The shark-eyed carpet-baggers, and the bean-counters and box-tickers who enable them. 

What about you? The cocktail socialists, the twinkly idealists, the culturally progressive, the socially conservative – why can’t I hear you sound your barbaric yawp over the loft extensions of the world? Shame on your silence. Shame, in a way, about mine, too.

Yes, howled and raged, I have. But what’s the point, eh? My outrage has been futile, has been roundly disregarded, politely ignored by everyone. In that sense, being the ghost of me is very much like being the late me. Ee-aye-addio, on we go, I suppose …

*Subs: do NOT ‘correct’ this to ‘tonnes’. We are not weighing the bloody pubs, are we? I reject this effete modern rendering. Besides, we have left the blasted Common Market, I understand.

The Ghost of Nairn is channelled by Jason Hazeley and Ian Martin