In 1977, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady was published, a book that was what it said on the tin: the 1906 nature notes of the art teacher Edith Holden, attractively repackaged. It was a hit, and for years afterwards other titles appeared using some variation or combination of country, diary, Edwardian and lady, decorated with imitations of Holden’s sweet sketches of flowers. There was also merchandise – tea towels, calendars, biscuit tins.

The architectural style of brutalism, which lasted roughly from the 1950s to the mid-70s, may never attract the same readership, but there is nonetheless a burgeoning industry, following brave celebrations of the style in the writings and broadcasts of Owen Hatherley and Jonathan Meades, of books that wield the B-word: Brutalism: Post-War British Architecture; This Brutal World; Space, Hope and Brutalism; Brutalism Resurgent; Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World. Also, the related Concretopia. There is a brutalist London map and you can buy notecards of brutalist London. As Barnabas Calder notes in his contribution to the genre, Raw Concrete: the Beauty of Brutalism, there are now plates, mugs, T-shirts and indeed tea towels that celebrate it.

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Calder is an art historian, and came to his subject via studies of medieval churches and 18th-century country houses. He describes himself as a nice middle-class boy brought up to like the sort of Edwardian terraces in which he was raised and to deplore the aggressive, stained concrete monstrosities known as brutalist. Now, he claims, he believes brutalism to be “the high point of architecture in the entire history of humanity… one of the greatest ever flowerings of human creativity and ingenuity”.

If ever a style were damned out of its own mouth, it was this. “Brutalist”, ergo brutal. “Gothic” and “baroque” both started off as insults from those who didn’t like these types of architecture, but brutalism’s own makers and promoters chose to self-identify with this harsh word which, when fashion turned, was used to beat it. The name was first popularised by the critic and brutalist champion Reyner Banham and had a three-fold root: from the French béton brut, meaning raw concrete; from the nickname “Brutus”, which was given to the leading protagonist Peter Smithson; and as the opposite of the “new humanism”, a somewhat prissy form of light modernism against which Banham, Smithson et al wanted to react. It was meant to upset people, and it did.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Remarkable’: Hermit’s Castle on the north-west coast of Scotland. Photograph: unknown/Barnabas Calder

The main attraction for Calder, as for other contemporary fans, is its boldness and passion. Like the architecture of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, or Victorians such as William Butterfield and the proud-to-be-ugly Samuel Sanders Teulon, it ran the gamut of emotions – fear and darkness as well as hope and light. It wanted to stir, move and provoke. Calder is also careful to point out that architects didn’t choose concrete because it was cheap or easy to use: it took craftsmanship, and money, to achieve the special textures and effects they wanted. Nor were they blind adherents to the new, but passionately interested in architectural history and the relationship of their work to it.

Calder’s distinctive approach is a combination of scholarliness with personal association. He is good on detail and such things as the role of cheap energy in making brutalism (badly insulated, and often requiring air conditioning and lifts) possible. The personal element comes when he favours buildings in places where his academic career has taken him, such as Glasgow and Cambridge. It makes for a readable, informative, if sometimes eccentric, account. There is not all that much on Peter Smithson and his wife Alison, who were at the core of brutalism. There is quite a lot on Denys Lasdun, architect of the National Theatre, a favourite of Calder’s (and mine) but who didn’t like the term brutalist and didn’t think himself one. He makes a remarkable, if small, discovery of Hermit’s Castle, a miniature fortified-looking refuge on the remote north-west coast of Scotland, built by the young architect David Scott with his own hands, using beach sand for the concrete.

Calder raises but doesn’t entirely face down a central issue of brutalism. Was it really about supporting a new social order, as sometimes claimed, for the benefit of working people? Or was it more the plaything of well-educated, well-off boys (mostly boys) who used the budgets of the welfare state for their personal artistic gratification? Both, at different times and sometimes the same time, is probably the answer.

In the end Calder’s main interest in the buildings is as fascinating objects of art history, updates of those churches and palaces with which he started. It makes the book an engaging and accessible guide for those drawn towards these ex-monstrosities, and for those who wonder what it’s all about.

Raw Concrete is published by William Heinemann (£25). Click here to buy it for £20