Mark Swenarton, ‘Cook’s Camden’ Book Review: ‘to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Brutalism, Camden, Neave Brown

Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: the Making of Modern Housing (Lund Humphries, 2017)

To Mark Swenarton, the work of Sydney Cook (Camden Borough Architect from 1965 to 1973) and his talented team represents ‘an architectural resolution unsurpassed not just in social housing in the UK but in urban housing anywhere in the world’.  Usually that kind of comment might be dismissed as hype but here I think huge numbers would agree. This fine book makes the case comprehensively and convincingly.

Cook’s big idea, shared and executed brilliantly by the architects he recruited to Camden, was for housing which was low-rise and high-density.  It directly challenged the architectural fashions of the day – the tower blocks which (in perceptual terms at least) dominated new council housing from the mid-1960s and the mixed development ideas which licensed them.  Equally, he rejected ‘off-the-peg’ system-building.

The new direction pioneered in Camden offered, in the words of Neave Brown, Cook’s best known recruit, an opportunity not only to re-engage with the ‘traditional social and physical form and virtues of the city’ but, crucially, ‘to try and improve on them’.  This wasn’t some pastiche revival of the old terraces but rather, as Swenarton claims, a ‘modern urbanism’; one that ‘could be generated without creating a rupture with either the existing grain of the city or the prevailing way of life’.

And then, essentially, there was the politics; unlike some historians of architecture Swenarton is good on the politics.  Camden was, by some way (excepting the Cities of London and Westminster), the richest borough in London, with a rateable value of £3,994,000.  Moreover, it was from inception a left-wing borough (despite a significant Tory interregnum from 1968 to 1971), determined, as one its leading members Enid Wistrich stated, ‘to be the tops’.  Housing was to be the chief expression of its progressive and innovative politics.

Fleet Road, image by Tim Crocker

Neave Brown, recently awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for lifetime achievement, takes centre stage. His first Camden project, Fleet Road designed in 1966-67, established the philosophical keynote of Camden’s new housing. In Brown’s words, the ‘primary decision’ was taken:

to build low, to fill the site, to geometrically define open space, to integrate.  And to return to housing the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

This was followed through on majestic scale at Alexandra Road.  Here there would be terraces, not the voguish streets in the sky which excited many architects of the day.  They would form, Swenarton says, ‘a continuous fabric…interspersed with public or semi-public squares’; ‘rather than the buildings being objects surrounded by space’, as was the case in the prevailing mixed development schemes, ‘the buildings should define the space’.

Much more could be said and it is covered in great detail in the book but Swenarton also gives due space and credit to other Camden architects.  Peter Tábori, though barely 27 when appointed by Cook to design the Highgate New Town development in 1967, brought an impressive architectural pedigree, having been tutored by Ernő Goldfinger (remembered by him as ‘a born educator’), Richard Rogers and Denys Lasdun no less.

Tábori was firmly opposed to the estate concept which dominated public housing at the time, taking his ideas of ‘through routes and visual connection’, self-policing public space and clearly defined private space from the newly influential writings of Jane Jacobs.

It’s a necessary – though sad – reminder of the limitations of architectural good intentions to learn that by 1983 the estate (because it was in essence an estate) was deemed ‘a haven for hoodlums…a warren of lonely walkways and blind spots’.  Fourteen years later, another journalist concluded ‘as an experiment in social housing, the Highgate New Town development has failed’. It hadn’t, of course, but it had gone through (and has since recovered from) troubled times. The simple fact – though complex reality – is that wider societal dynamics often influence our residential experience far more than design itself.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

However, it was the Branch Hill Estate in Hampstead, designed by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, begun in 1971 and finally completed in 1978, which best captures both the increasingly fraught housing politics of Camden and the design brilliance.  Chapter 6 ‘Class War in Hampstead: the battle of Branch Hill’ describes the former – ‘it was a classic tale of privilege versus the people’ in Swenarton’s words.  Chapter 7 ‘The Poetics of Housing: Benson and Forsyth at Branch Hill’ powerfully evokes the latter.

Branch Hill, image by Tim Crocker

The Labour Group was determined to build council housing in leafy, affluent Hampstead; the Conservative Group (though internal differences existed) mostly opposed.  The cost of the project with respect to the initial purchase price of the land and the design and constructional fixes that a difficult site and restrictive covenant required, brought this conflict into sharper focus.  In the end, Labour – back in power in Camden in 1973 and nationally from 1974 – won out and the housing was built.

It was quite probably, as hostile commentary claimed, ‘the most expensive council housing in the world’ – 21 pairs of two-storey houses in three rows, costing in total some £2.8m.  But it is also, according to Derek Abbott and Kimball Pollit, ‘the most sophisticated semi-detached housing in the world’.  The covenant on the land insisted upon a two-storey maximum height and semi-detached homes. That Benson and Forsyth achieved a resolution in signature Camden style – stepped terraces, external walls of board marked and smooth white concrete, and dark-stained timber joinery – yet unique and distinctive is a tribute both to the architects and the political will and vision of the Council.

Underlying this, for Benson and Forsyth, was:

the fundamental belief that, while buildings must satisfy practical requirements empirically, they must also embody those abstract properties which arouse the senses and satisfy the mind.

Branch Hill, and Camden’s other architect-designed estates, fulfil this dictum with style and panache.

The tide, however, was turning.  The Conservatives’ 1972 Housing Finance Act stipulated so-called ‘fair rents’ closer to the market rents of the private sector (albeit offset by a comprehensive national scheme of rent rebates). Camden, alongside other Labour authorities, initially pledged to resist the legislation but capitulated. (Famously, only Clay Cross Council in Derbyshire fought the Act to the bitter end.)  The ensuing high rents were another problem for the Branch Hill scheme.

Mansfield Road, Gospel Oak – an example of ‘urban dentistry’, image by Tim Crocker

By 1975, it was Anthony Crosland, Labour’s Secretary of State for the Environment, declaring ‘the party’s over’. Economic hard times and financial crisis called time on the public sector expansion which had marked much of the post-war period. In Camden, there were other straws in the wind.  A middle-class, owner-occupier revolt had scuppered earlier plans for the comprehensive redevelopment of Gospel Oak back in 1966.  It anticipated a broader sea-change – a move against large-scale slum clearance (indeed, a questioning of what constituted a ‘slum’) and a drive towards rehabilitation of what were now called ‘twilight areas’.

In the 1970s, this change was reflected in an expanded policy of municipalisation – the Council’s acquisition and management of formerly private rental properties.   Its counterpart was what Swenarton calls ‘urban dentistry’ – selective demolition of housing deemed beyond repair and small-scale infill, often designed (though to typically high Camden standards) by private practices.

Maiden Lane, image by Tim Crocker

As noted by Swenarton, Labour’s 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act represented another shift – though its longer-term consequences were poorly understood – in the nature of council housing with its codification of needs-based allocation.  Another Benson and Forsyth scheme (though their original designs were significantly modified), Maiden Lane caught the brunt of this:

The result was that many of the tenancies…were channelled by social services straight to homeless families and others with greatest need. This was a social composition very different from most of the Camden estates.

Maiden Lane became notorious, one of those estates demonised by the media as dysfunctional and crime-ridden. The architects insist that its ‘architecture, quality of place internally and externally….was elegant, humane and economic’ and blame ‘ineffectual management, social conflict, and banal architectural intervention’ for the estate’s later woes.  There’s some truth in this for sure but it’s another reminder that architecture – whether deemed good or bad – is far from solely determining the lived experience of residents.

Maiden Lane has been substantially redesigned since and, if you’re seeking a symbol of just how far we’ve come from the heady idealism of Cook’s Camden, the Council has recently built 273 flats on the estate: 149 for sale on the open market, 53 for shared ownership and 71 new council flats. Those for sale reflect the new wisdom that private capital must be harnessed to finance the regeneration and expansion of social housing.  But, unusually, the development as a whole increased council housing stock and Camden Council continues to own and management most of its social housing. (1)

Alexandra Road, image by Tim Crocker

Alexandra Road, Grade II* listed in 1994, had its problems too though these related to the complex saga of its drawn-out construction and escalating cost. ‘Conceived in 1968, in the period of optimism generated by the post-war boom, but constructed during the crisis decade that followed’, the finished estate of 520 homes took twice as long to build as projected and cost, on completion in 1979, some £18.9m.  At the same time, it became a pawn in Labour’s internal politics as a ‘hard left’ faction (some may dislike Swenarton’s use of the term) led by Ken Livingstone wrestled for control against what had now become Labour’s old guard.

Livingstone, elected a Camden councillor in 1978, became chair of housing and used a Council-instigated public inquiry into what was now widely seen as the Alexandra Road debacle as a means of discrediting the former leadership.  In truth, the inquiry found no blame attached to the Architect’s Department (though it noted staff shortages, for which it was blameless, were a factor) and there were myriad problems – relating to the site, changing specifications and, above all, contemporary troubles in the building trades – which did account for the scheme’s financial difficulties.

However, at the last minute, the Council itself inserted a clause suggesting that some of the increasing costs might have been avoided ‘if the Architect himself had exercised more foresight with regards to the demands of the project’.  Livingstone moved on to the bigger stage of the Greater London Council. Incredibly, Neave Brown, so unfairly impugned, would not work in Britain again.

A sad end to what John Winter has called a ‘a magical moment for English housing’.  At the outset, for Sydney Cook and his team:

the challenge was to address the deficiencies of the housing that had been, and was still being, produced by local authorities across the country: to take forward the project of the welfare state – but to do it better.

By 1979, and decisively under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, it was, as Swenarton notes, ‘no longer the deficiencies of the form of housing produced by the welfare state, but the welfare state itself that was under attack’.  In the end, in this brave new world, Camden’s path-breaking housing programme had minimal domestic impact though it was influential on the Continent.  Alexandra Road, and the Borough’s other pioneering schemes, suffered ‘from having been released into a different world to that in which it was conceived…set on the very cusp of the change from socialism to the me-generation’. (2)

You’ll find all this discussed more fully in the book and much, much more – in particular a rich analysis of architectural influences and forms which I’ve barely touched on here. I’m sorry to gush but it’s hard to imagine a better book on its topic.  OK, I’ll earn my reviewer’s credentials by wishing for a bit more on the buildings’ after-lives (discussed a little more fully in some of my blog posts) but the book does what it sets out to do superbly.

Lamble Street interior, Gospel Oak, image by Tim Crocker

The photography stands out – Martin Charles’ earlier images and Tim Crocker’s wonderful contemporary photographs of which I include a selection.  The schemes themselves are pretty photogenic in skilled hands but Crocker’s shots of lived-in interiors and real live people inside and out bring out their qualities in a more humane and personal way than is common in architectural photography. These are complemented by a profusion of maps, plans and architectural drawings.

Congratulations to Stefi Orazi for the book design, to the publishers Lund Humphries for their commitment to the highest production values, and, above all, to Mark Swenarton. His scholarship and hard work have surely produced what is and will remain the definitive account of Cook’s Camden.

Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, by Mark Swenarton, is published by Lund Humphries (HB £45) The book is for sale on the publisher’s website with free UK postage. If you insert the code CAMDEN10 on check-out, single copies will receive a £10 discount.   

References

(1) David Spittles, ‘It’s a game changer: Camden is first council to build homes to sell’, Evening Standard Homes and Property, 19 November 2014. The article incorrectly states that the whole of the scheme was built for private sale.

(2) Martin Pawley, ‘Living on the Edge of Time’, The Guardian, 2 April 1990

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Highgate New Town: dreams and nightmares

Tags

1970s, 1980s, 2000s, Camden, Regeneration

As we saw in last week’s post, as Stage Two of the Highgate New Town redevelopment was winning plaudits, Stage One – the Whittington Estate – was unloved and, in some contemporary accounts, troubled.  By 1983, it was described by the local press as a ‘haven for hoodlums’.  In 2015, it appears to have become a haven for architects.  Though some may fail to see the distinction, we’ll look at what’s changed and examine in more detail the contemporary face of social housing.

Trend Five: ‘Defensible Space’

Back in the 1980s, then fashionable theories of ‘defensible space’ ruled.  Its ideologues argued, firstly, that public housing schemes were peculiarly liable to problems of crime and antisocial behaviour – because they were public, because their residents (or those passing through) felt no pride in ownership or sense of responsibility for them.  They argued, further, that public schemes typically shared design flaws which both encouraged and facilitated crime. (1)

All this can – and should – be picked apart: the inappropriateness of Oscar Newman’s US model, the ludicrous failure to apply any socio-economic context, the failure to acknowledge that contemporary problems of antisocial behaviour afflicted schemes of very varying design.  But the ‘common sense’ of an age is a difficult thing to oppose and it was taken up with gusto with regard to the Whittington Estate.

Stoneleigh Terrace, the Whittington Estate

That alarmist headline quoted earlier came from the St Pancras Chronicle. Its report continued, in similarly lurid style, to describe the Estate’s residents living ‘in daily fear of robbery, burglary and vandalism’ and the Estate itself as ‘a warren of lonely walkways and blind spots’.  Council officers commented on the ‘large number of potential hiding places for attackers who can then make their escape through any one of the many entrances to the area’. (2) The Council and the police promised to step up their patrols.

This was the ‘defensible space’ thesis in full flight and, of course, the problems it describes – the experience of crime and, as importantly, the fear of crime – were real enough even if one resident did wonder what all the fuss was about and thought the design of the estate ‘not better or worse than anywhere else’.

The problems – and the apparently compelling narrative which accompanied them – seem to have become even more entrenched fifteen years later. The Estate was a ‘dream that became a nightmare’: (3)

as an experiment in social housing, the Highgate New Town development has failed.  Its white walls are daubed with graffiti, walkways cluttered with syringes, the heating system is defunct and cars are frequently set alight in its underground car parks.

Children at play: an early image of the Whittington Estate

Yet when Su Rogers described the Estate in a generally critical piece back in 1973, she noted how its walkways retained ‘the functions of a traditional street with much local activity, the milk float, children playing and the supervision from the dwelling units’.(4)

And a contemporary resident praises the design: (5)

as it’s pedestrianised the kids all play outside together without fear of the traffic. It’s easy to bump into neighbours and have a quick chat or wave from the balconies, there’s a real sense of community.

I don’t have a judgment to offer on all this, only a perspective.  That is, whatever the specific factors which played in to the rise of antisocial behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s, they owed far more to dynamics in the wider society than they did to any given form of council housing.  The long view and the wider view should allow us to move beyond any simple demonisation of council housing, then and now.

Lulot Gardens, Whittington Estate

We can agree, I think, that the large underground car park built under the Estate – a last gasp of the car culture that briefly held thrall in the 1960s – was a mistake.  It was certainly an engineering nightmare.  Problems of water seepage instigated a £4m repair job in 2006 which, in conjunction with an overall refurbishment of the Estate, took three years and may in the end have cost the Council – as claims and counter-claims between it and contractors ensued – as much as £10m in total.

Leaseholders, who faced bills of up to £20,000, were particularly critical of the Council’s management of the process but were fortunate in having the expertise of six architects living on the Estate to make their case. (6)

Trend Six: ‘Tenure Diversification’

These, of course, were not council tenants.  Around one third of homes on the Highgate New Town estates are now privately owned, a product of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation of 1980. For one former tenant, who bought his five-bedroom home for £39,000 and has seen its market value rise from £70,000 to over £600,000, this was ‘perfect, absolutely perfect’.

But many of those original purchasers have sold on, of course – one who bought his flat for £30,000 to an architect (what else?) who paid £250,000.  ‘He bought a yacht, I expect’, says the latter; more likely he moved to Essex. (7)

These new leaseholders, overwhelmingly belonging to the professional middle class, love the Estate for ‘its Modernist aesthetic and attention to detail in the design’ and ‘the amount of space you get for your money’. (8)  Yes, this is the council housing we’ve been taught to despise.

The newcomers are often active in the community and likely to praise its friendliness and mix.  I’ve no interest at all in criticising them personally but, as a group, they are the beneficiaries of a process that in London particularly has vastly reduced the amount of affordable social housing available to those who need it most.

Highgate Newtown Community Centre

The weekly community lunches and food bank at the Highgate Newtown Community Centre tell another story – of those left poor and marginalised in our unequal society: (9)

There’s a lack of benefits, lateness of benefits, increases in rent, increases in food prices, electric, gas… just a general increase in everything.

Working-class families who once dreamed of moving into council homes of the quality of Highgate New Town are now, with no possibility of buying a property, forced to rent inferior and costly accommodation from private landlords whose income we subsidise though Housing Benefit.  Over one third of council homes purchased through Right to Buy in London are now privately rented, some are even rented back by local authorities. (10)  Madness!

Critically, councils were prevented from using the receipts of council house sales to build new homes.  Presently, most of the new social housing being built is predicated on a financial chicanery – the sell-off of older social units and real estate, the construction of homes for sale and homes for ‘affordable’ rent which are nothing of the kind – which destroys existing estates and communities.

The now demolished terrace of shops on Chester Road © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

The most recent phase of construction in Highgate New Town is a very benign example of this.  As we saw last week, the small prototype scheme at the corner of Chester Road and Raydon Street was arguably overdue for demolition. Twenty-five council homes were lost; of the 53 which replaced them, 23 are social rented, four for shared ownership and 26 for private sale.  (All the latter are now sold – the cheapest studio flat at £300,000 in 2013.)

In the current topsy-turvy world of housing finance, Camden Council – which still manages directly about 33,000 homes in the Borough and houses around a quarter of the population – probably deserves some credit for this.

Not that you can please everyone.  One of the private buyers has recently been bought off by the Council – there were teething problems in the build but he seemed most exercised by neighbouring tenants using their balconies: (11)

We bought this flat knowing there was a bit of a risk, because it was half council and half private.  We were told there was a lease that was enforceable. We said we were quite worried, but they said they could not put laundry on the terrace or rubbish on the terrace. Now they are telling us the lease is not enforceable.

To be fair, as this blog always is, there’s a pretty long paternalist tradition of Council tenancy conditions banning laundry and the like on balconies to encourage ‘respectability’ within the working-class communities.  It’s just that the attempt gains piquancy when tenants are expected so directly to defer to middle-class sensitivities.

Now all this will have frustrated the architectural groupies among you because most would see the real significance of the new scheme in terms of its design standards and principles.

Trend Seven: ‘Sustainability’

The £9.25m Chester-Balmore Scheme (as it’s known) built to replace the temporary and failed high-tech first phase of Stage Two, designed by Rick Mather Architects, is the first social housing scheme in the country and the largest scheme of any kind to be built to Passivhaus standard.  The buildings’ insulation, triple glazing, high-tech boilers and air circulation systems – the only actual heating provided is a towel rail – are all intended to keep fuel bills down to less than a £100 a year…and help save the planet.

Raydon Street and Chester Road corner

In terms of appearance, the scheme’s two residential blocks of stacked maisonettes with universal ground-floor front door access are intended to ‘fit’ the existing streetscape while a larger ‘gateway’ block (which will include new shops) marks the corner of Chester Road and Raydon Street. (12)  Observers will have different views on how well its fulfils this brief.

Balmore Street

Perhaps I’ve treated this last and significant development rather briefly but I may already be trying your patience.  I hadn’t expected to write so much on Highgate New Town but the more I researched the more it revealed of the architectural fashions that have shaped council housing and the political and social forces which have moulded the lives of its residents.

I’ve no great conclusion other than to advise a longer view which accepts that tastes change and context is all.  It is the latter which inexplicably is so often forgotten in much of what passes as analysis of social housing and it is that omission which has caused such damage to what should be understood as one of the proudest achievements of our welfare state.

Sources

(1) The key texts here are, from the US, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (1972) and, his British acolyte, Alice Coleman, Utopia on trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (1985)

(2) Terry Messenger, ‘Haven for Hoodlums’, St Pancras Chronicle, 15 April 1983

(3) Lara Lambert, ‘The Dream that Became a Nightmare’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 17 January 1997

(4) Su Rogers, ‘Preview: Highgate New Town’, Architectural Review, September 1973

(5) Modernist Estates, ‘Chrissie Macdonald and Andrew Rae: Whittington Estate, London N19’, 1 July 2013

(6) The reference to six architects comes from Dan Carrier, ‘Estate revamp “sacking” chaos’, Camden New Journal, 26 April 2007; the £10m figure from Dan Carrier, ‘Town Hall pay out millions to sacked builders’, Camden New Journal, 22 October 2009.  Residents were complaining that the repairs had been carried out inadequately as late as 2011 – see Kate Ferguson, ‘Highgate residents hit out at “shoddy’ management of estate’, Ham& High, 14 September 2011.

(7) Brian Milligan, ‘Right-to-buy: Margaret Thatcher’s controversial gift’, BBC News, 10 April 2013

(8) Modernist Estates, ‘Chrissie Macdonald and Andrew Rae: Whittington Estate, London N19

(9) Kate Beioley, ‘The food-bank family: Highgate residents in crisis and the community project easing the pain’, Ham & High, 31 January 2013

(10) Daniel Boffey, ‘Private landlords cash in on right-to-buy – and send rents soaring for poorest tenants’, The Observer, 12 January 2014

(11) William McLennan, ‘Town Hall faces £1m bill over trouble-hit flagship estate after couple offered £60k payoff’, Camden New Journal, 5 February 2015

(12) Rick Mather Architects, Chester-Balmore 

Thanks again to Modern Architecture London for permission to use photographs taken in August 2011 of the now demolished section of the original development.  Its post on Highgate New Town offers a range of good images and further detail on the development as a whole.

And my thanks also to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Dartmouth Park Hill Estate, Camden: ‘memories of Edwardian villas and the welcoming scale of a delightful suburbia’

Tags

1970s, 1980s, Camden

Last week’s post looked at Stage One of the Highgate New Town development – Peter Tábori’s Whittington Estate.  That’s the estate which sets architectural pulses racing now but back in the day it was unfashionable even before it was finished in 1979; it was Stage Two – very different in design and conception – that won awards and kudos.

Stage Two: Dartmouth Park Hill

The construction problems and delays associated with the Whittington Estate had led Camden to decide upon a very different path for later phases of the redevelopment as early as the mid-seventies. In the first place, however, the Council opted for a quick fix but the prototype design it selected was surprisingly innovative in both technique and form.

Trend Four: High Tech

The two new terraces – of shops and maisonettes along Chester Road and maisonettes and bedsitters on Balmoral Street – were designed by Bill Forrest and Oscar Palacio of the Council’s Department of Technical Services in the emerging High Tech form, marked by a ‘preference for lightweight materials and sheer surfaces, a readiness to adopt new techniques from engineering…and the celebratory display of a building’s construction and services’. (1)

‘Highgate New Town – stage 2a/2b’, © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

But there the comparison with the Lloyds Building ends.  The scheme was completed ahead of time in March 1978 and its ‘rather delicate prefab aesthetic…its light touch, thin blue railings against white and terracotta asbestos-cement panels…looked fine when finished – and for a few months after’.  After that, however, it came – in the eyes of one astringent commentator, at least – to look more like ‘a pair of abandoned trams or the beat-up housing compounds of migrant workers in Africa, its form and construction ‘quite unsuited to public housing’. (2)

‘Highgate New Town – stage 2a/2b’, © Modern Architecture London and used with permission

The terraces, given a life-time of 25 years, would somehow survive another thirty years, replaced only recently by the current state of the art development we’ll examine in the next post. (3)

In the interim, the next stage of Forrest and Palacio’s plans – usually called the Dartmouth Park Hill Estate – was designed with a very different aesthetic and garnered very different reactions.

Trend Three again: ‘Back to the Future’ – the rejection of estates and a return to streets

Stage One, the Whittington Estate, had had a difficult birth and turned out – in architectural terms at least if not to the many it provided a fine new home – an unwanted child.

Roger Stonehouse, writing two years after its completion, captured the mood: (4)

It is a typical story of the 60s and 70s – a dramatic swing of attitude away from massive high density redevelopment in complex forms of innovative construction, towards gradual renewal at lower density in low rise, traditional forms of housing using traditional construction.

This was reflected in the new guidance from the then Department of Environment supporting gradual renewal of run-down areas through a combination of rehabilitation and selective infill. Camden itself had adopted a policy requiring all families with children to be housed on the ground floor.

Thus it was that around half the houses originally scheduled for demolition in the succeeding phase were retained and refurbished.  The new-build began in 1978 and was finished in 1981 at a total cost a little over of £1.5m, providing homes for some 287 people in a combination of two and three-person flats and four to five-person houses.

Camden’s signature dark-stained wood remained and the scheme retained some colourful elements and flourishes in its glazed and metal-framed access stairways, white panelling and red-brick detailing.  But, brick-built and two-three-storey, it was in essence – as Stonehouse describes – ‘a return to housing which is more clearly related to its surroundings’.

To Lionel Esher in A Broken Wave – an early elegy on the ebbing of the briefly-linked tides of Welfare State ambition and architectural modernism – Dartmouth Park Hill was a key example of this shift in thinking: (5)

Even the Camden Borough architects, hitherto whiter than white, switched to yellow brick with red stripes and pretty ironwork.

The Civic Trust, which commended the scheme in 1983, was more positive, indeed effusive; the new housing suggested: (6)

memories of Edwardian villas and the welcoming scale of a delightful suburbia.  Every element of the design, down to the last detail of sign-writing, has been carefully considered and sensitively handled.  The environment created is rich in content, colour and texture, and the imagination is stimulated by a wealth of delightfully rendered images and totems – entrance urns, porches, balcony ironware, trellises, archways.  It is not often that nineteenth century housing appears at a disadvantage in comparison with new-build, but this scheme enhances the surroundings.

If all this does suggest to modernists a too homely and home-spun design, the scheme remains striking, particularly in its long three-strong barrier block fronting Dartmouth Park Hill.  The red, green and white detailing adds colour and interest and the block possesses a scale and presence.  The access stairways break up the long terrace, creating a deliberate echo of the Edwardian homes facing, but it’s still the later development which has more bravura.

The rear of Dartmouth Park Hill

Balconies to the rear provided a little outdoor space though Stonehouse expressed concern that some were already ‘a little cluttered’ – a minor point perhaps but (as we’ll see next week) one that can cause alarm to those for whom this small sign of council house tenants taking ‘ownership’ of their homes can spoil the aesthetic they seek.

Corner of Raydon Street and Dartmouth Park Hill

The short terrace of houses on Raydon Street facing the Whittington Estate looks timid in comparison – a ‘thoroughly turned-tide, pointless humility’ according to Douglas Murphy (7) – but the small triangle of houses built around an attractive, green open space on Doynton Street looks pretty good and the resident I spoke to was happy to live there and happy to have it photographed once she’d ascertained there was no nefarious purpose.

Doynton Street

While wandering around the Estate, I also met the widow of one of the original team of architects – also a resident (and a tenant, mark you, not a leaseholder), she too was very fond of the scheme and proud to have it recognised.  It’s due to have its heating and water systems updated and she was anxious that new exposed pipework would disfigure the archways providing through access.  I hope the Council will be sensitive to this.

Finally, and a clear prefiguring of another concern that will take centre-stage next week, the public open spaces of the scheme were kept to a minimum for reasons of maintenance and – the key issue perhaps – security.  Roads were retained either as roads or as pedestrian through-routes – this was ‘good’ open space – offering permeability in the modern jargon.  The separation of traffic and pedestrians and the very enclosedness that was an initial virtue of the Whittington Estate were now seen as problematic, estates themselves had become a problem.

The next post will look at the next trend that would mark our understanding of council estates, the theories of ‘defensible space’ that dominated the nineteen-eighties.  It will examine the fall and rise of the Whittington Estate, the changes of tenure which have transformed council housing and the very latest building forms and principles which replaced the flawed design of the High Tech element of this second phase of the Highgate New Town development.

We’ll conclude today, however, with words spoken in 1983 which were, sadly, even then anachronistic.  Whether you applaud the architectural bravura of Stage One or the more ‘in keeping’ urbanism of Stage Two, we should remember above all this was housing built to serve the needs of the people.  As Cllr Bill Birtles, then chair of the Council’s Housing Development Committee stated: (8)

Not only have we the obligation to rehouse thousands of people in the borough; we also have an obligation to house them well and to house them in the most pleasant and elegant surroundings we can manage.

Camden did that in some style.

Sources

(1) RIBA, High Tech (‘The Brits who built the Modern World’)

(2) ‘Astragal’ in the Architects’ Journal, 1980, quoted in Fabian Wilkinson, ‘The Rebuilding of Highgate New Town’, Highgate Society Buzz, Winter 2001

(3) My thanks to Modern Architecture London for permission to use photographs taken in August 2011 just prior to demolition.  Its post on Highgate New Town offers a range of good images and further detail on the development as a whole.

(4) Roger Stonehouse, ‘Building Study: Housing of Highgate New Town, London N19, Architects’ Journal, 12 August 1981

(5) Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England 1940-1980 (1981)

(6) Quoted in Camden Council, ‘Press Release HNT Stage 2 got Civic Trust award’, 29 November 1983

(7) Douglas Murphy, ‘A Trip to N19’, 7 September 2011

(8) Quoted in Camden Council, ‘Press Release HNT Stage 2 got Civic Trust award’

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Whittington Estate, Camden: ‘a form of housing…more closely related to the existing urban fabric’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Camden

This is a story about fashion – the changing ideas and shifting trends which shape popular beliefs about housing and the planners’ briefs which emerge.  It reflects also – and perhaps unfashionably in discussions around the architecture of council housing – on how these affect those for whom this housing was intended whose needs (as the latest round of ‘regeneration’ shows even more strongly) are often marginal to the talk and decisions which take place.

Camden’s Highgate New Town redevelopment, begun in the late sixties and completed in 1981 by which time the door had slammed on such municipal dreams, offers as fine a case study of council housing’s fickle fashions as you could wish for.  Follow me on this three-part journey.

Whittington Estate, Raydon Street

Camden itself was becoming ‘trendy’ in the sixties and the new council formed in 1965 made the most of this – it was a (predominantly) Labour borough with the style, ambition and the rateable value to build council housing of the highest quality.  We’ve looked at its fine Alexandra Road and Branch Hill Estates already and today we examine another of its flagship schemes, the Whittington Estate.

Trend One: the demolition of rundown Victorian terraces 

Highgate New Town was an area of working-class terraced housing developed in later nineteenth century.  Multi-occupied from the outset, parts rapidly acquired a poor reputation and, as 75 per cent of the homes lacked bathrooms, it was a natural target for the planners and politicians of the sixties in their aim to rid the country once and for all of the slums which still housed many of our working-class. (1)

We’ll see that aim or, at least, that strategy questioned later but it’s worth remembering just how substandard those homes were and how far superior in space and facilities the local authority homes which replaced them.  The old terraces were seen as unhealthy and monotonous and those who moved out generally felt little affection for the world they left behind.

Trend Two: Low rise, high density

Camden’s planning of Stage One of the redevelopment scheme – what became the Whittington Estate – began in 1968.  The collapse of Ronan Point, a system-built tower block, in May that year had provided a final impetus to the increasing opposition to high-rise but, in this, Camden was ahead of the game.

Instead, the Council was developing what became its own signature house style: (2)

the linear stepped-section block…A form of housing was sought which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground.

The Estate’s pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber are also typical features of the Camden housing schemes of the era.

Stoneleigh Terrace

The design emerged, almost unbelievably, from the diploma project of a young Hungarian architect, Peter Tábori, then in his mid-twenties.  So impressed was Camden Borough Architect, Sydney Cook, with the project that he commissioned Tábori to design the final scheme.

The Whittington Estate comprises six parallel terraces – 271 dwellings housing around 1100, ranging from one-bed flats to six-bed houses – enclosing four pedestrian streets.  The bare description does little to capture the scheme’s attractiveness, firstly the intimacy of scale achieved by its thoughtful use of a sloping site.

Towards Sandstone Place

Then there are the terraces which are varied in form and broken up by staggered throughways to ensure each has a distinct character and appearance; the green spaces and play areas between them; and finally, the more informal planting which provides a greenery that obliterates any starkness that could linger in the Estate’s design.  If this is Brutalism, it’s very domesticated.

Sandstone Place

The individual homes, each with their own directly-accessed front door, received similar attention. Kitchens were placed to overlook the pedestrian walkways and allow supervision of children, anticipating the current vogue for what is called ‘the natural surveillance of the streets’.  All homes had a south-facing outdoor space – a balcony or terrace – and in dwellings of more than one floor living space was generally placed at an upper level to maximise internal light – glazed walls separated the living room from the terraces.

The interiors, mainly designed by Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services, were planned for flexible use – walls were divided into panels by storey-height doors, double doors and sliding partitions allowed for rooms to be opened up or closed according to need.  (3)

Entrance way, Lulot Gardens

If all this gets a contemporary thumbs-up, another nod to prevailing wisdom – the provision of a huge underground car park based on one car space per dwelling – now looks decidedly dodgy and became very problematic.  The full-time attendant planned didn’t materialise as local government belts were tightened and design features – attempts to introduce natural light and multiple entries – failed. Not overall a good use of the £611,890 spent on providing 268 car parking spaces. (4)

Still, in these less environmentally and apparently more status conscious times, Su Rogers, for one, was more concerned that ‘the status symbol of having your car parked outside the front door’ was neglected and only partly compensated for by the planned ‘Sunday morning workshops and “car washing clubs”’. (5)

Lulot Gardens looking towards Highgate Cemetery

For all the good intentions, the actual construction of the Estate was plagued with problems.  Building began in 1972 and was scheduled for completion in 1974.  The original contractors had problems with the scheme’s precast concrete panels and went bust in 1976.  Construction defects then required elements of the scheme built to date to be demolished and rebuilt.  In all, the Estate cost over £9m to build – well over twice the original estimate – and wasn’t finished until 1979.

The practical difficulties encountered in Stage 1 were a major factor in the decision to embark on a very different design for the second phase of redevelopment south of Raydon Street.  Changing tastes were another.

Trend Three: ‘Back to the Future’ – the rejection of estates and a return to streets

In this, and in the main thrust of her critique, Ms Rogers was far more prescient:

It is difficult not to question the policy of building housing “estates”, “areas”, “schemes” isolating one use from the more natural and spontaneous surrounding areas…I wonder how long it will be before the next generation will be appalled by the enormous acreage, albeit low-rise, of housing developments, self-contained within themselves with standard pedestrian decks, coloured front doors, toddler play areas, estate supermarkets and community centres which are the utopias of the local authorities.

Not long was the answer.  Written in 1973, this was an early anticipation of current wisdom – a wholesale rejection of the council estate model rooted in nostalgia for traditional streetscapes and the community which they (allegedly) fostered.

According to Su Rogers, ‘those wilful local authority signboards at the main entrance to postwar estates’ indicated by the very existence ‘failure by the architect to achieve any sort of order’

There’s much to unpick here – not least the romanticised notions of earlier housing forms and the disingenuous assumption that market-driven decisions (determined by class, relative power and wealth) are somehow innocent or ‘natural’.   But it reflects thinking that became the norm and was – without hyperbole – seismic in impact, not just on council housing but on the wider economy.  When planning is the enemy and the unfettered free market an ally, we open the door to the inequality and exploitation, the greed and division, which so mark contemporary society.

That politicians and planners made mistakes goes without saying, of course, some recognised in the very thinking which inspired the Whittington Estate.  Elsewhere, however, even as the Highgate scheme took off, reconditioning of older properties was becoming the vogue, not least in Camden itself where the Council’s wholesale purchase and refurbishment of such homes preserved many for working-class occupation. (6) Elsewhere in London these properties are now the des res’s of the middle-class, unaffordable to all but the most well-heeled.

Retcar Place

We’ll follow the continuing story of the Whittington Estate next week and look at the very different housing built in Stage Two of the Highgate New Town development – a continuing study in the contexts and trends that have shaped our social housing and, as importantly, our perceptions of it.

Sources

(1) Camden Council, Dartmouth Park Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Statement (January 2009)

(2) James Dunnett, ‘The Work of the Department of Technical Service’ in Camden Libraries and Arts Department, Modern Homes in Camden (1984)

(3) Fabian Wilkinson, ‘The Rebuilding of Highgate New Town’, Highgate Society Buzz, Winter 2001

(4) London Borough of Camden, Housing (Development) Subcommittee, 29 October 1979

(5) Su Rogers, ‘Preview: Highgate New Town’, Architectural Review, September 1973

(6) Owen Hatherley, ‘This Property is Condemned’, Mute, 30 April 2013

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

Housing in St Pancras before 1914: ‘the foulest parish in all London’

Tags

Camden, Pre-1914, St Pancras

After 1945, St Pancras Borough Council built more council housing than any comparable London borough.  That achievement looked unlikely in the early years of local administration which saw St Pancras dubbed ‘the foulest parish in all London’ but by 1914 the Borough, against initial resistance, had built the foundations of a housing record second to none.

Goldington Court

To begin with, that resistance: the pre-reform St Pancras Vestry – which ruled locally until 1900 – was slow to respond to problems of slum housing among the worst in London, so bad that even the Prince of Wales urged reform after an incognito visit to one particularly notorious district.

The evidence presented to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1884 by the local Medical Officer of Health, Dr Shirley Murphy, showed just how pressing was that need although Murphy himself resigned just one year later, frustrated by the inaction of the Vestry’s Moderate (Conservative) majority. (He went on to become the London County Council’s first Chief Medical Officer of Health – a position he used to pressure St Pancras to act.) (1)

St Pancras Vestry, 1874. The map is oriented south on left to north (with Hampstead Heath) on right. Approximate locations marked for (A) Prospect Terrace, (B) Flaxman Terrace, (C) Goldington Buildings. Click on the map for an enlarged view.

Prospect Terrace, an area of poor Irish settlement, just to the east of Gray’s Inn Road, was the particular focus of concern – an area (almost uniquely in London) of back-to-back housing, with death rates twice the capital’s average.  It was nicknamed – for reasons which are unclear but certainly not complimentary – Cat’s Meat Square.  A contemporary newspaper comment that the ‘Cockney Irish…seem to have the dirty habits of the Irish and the English added together’ was more revealing of upper class callousness than of the hard lives lived by their poorest compatriots.

The Vestry, still unwilling to spend its own money and with a number of slum landlords among its members, at first pressed the London County Council to act under part I of the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act as it had in Shoreditch where the first council estate in the country, the Boundary Estate, was planned. The LCC refused and pointed to local resources and responsibilities

Slowly and reluctantly the Vestry did respond.  In 1896, it proposed its own scheme to clear Prospect Terrace – and Bantome Place to the east – and erect municipal housing on site. Belatedly, in 1898, it also agreed to build a new tenement block to the north (at the intersection of Great College Street and St Pancras Way) intended, in principle, to rehouse a greater number of the 1500 people to be displaced.

The Vestry’s response remained dilatory, however.  When John Burns, the Lib-Lab MP, visited Prospect Terrace two years later he could still declare it worse than the Shoreditch area: in St Pancras ‘a new element was growing up: men who were living on women – the lowest of the low’.

One year later, the radical and campaigning journal Reynold’s News declared: (2)

St Pancras appears to be the foulest parish in all London.  It is indeed a veritable slum….Shame on the disgraceful Vestry responsible for this outrage on civilisation!  The whole of London must point the finger of scorn at such a disreputable public body and ask if it is league with the loathsome and criminal house-sweaters and rack-renters, most of whom ought to be in gaol…St Pancras is the Filth-hole and Sewage-yard of London.”

In the event, it was the Vestry’s successor, the St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council – still predominantly a Conservative body – formed in 1900, which would complete these projects.  It resolved to construct its new northern tenement block first.

Goldington Court

The Goldington Buildings were built between 1902 and 1904.  Externally, the building had – and retains – a certain grandeur with its red- and yellow-stock brick, corner quoins, terra-cotta detailing, decorative gables and mansard roof.  The opening programme boasted of its ‘large courtyard’ and ‘covered playing place for children’. (2)

Internally, it was far better accommodation than that which it replaced but it was basic – comprising 56 dwellings, mostly three-room tenements containing WCs, sculleries and coppers for hot water but no baths.

Goldington Court courtyard

But though ‘housing for the working classes’ (as its foundation stone states), its rents were too high for most of the displaced slum-dwellers.  Cheaper two-room flats let more readily but the three-room (at between 9s 6d and 11s 6d a week) were affordable only to the better-off. (3)  Indeed one of the earliest residents, William Neave, was a commercial traveller and his daughter a short-hand typist…until she became better known (and renamed) as Ethel le Neve, Dr Crippen’s mistress.

Since then Goldington Court (also renamed) has been modernised several times over to suit higher standards and changing times.  Most of the flats, but not all, had baths by 1935.  A major 1964 refurbishment replaced that now ‘dreary asphalt courtyard’ with a garden and increased the number of one-bed flats. Now managed by Origin Housing, the most recent (£3.9m) renovation in 2011 increased the number of larger family-size flats: 21 of the 30 current flats are three-bedroom.

All that, I guess, is a tribute to the sturdiness of the original construction and the resilience and adaptability of social housing.

Flaxman Terrace

After building the Goldington Buildings, the Council cleared Brantome Place and built in its stead Flaxman Terrace – 84 flats and a caretaker’s lodge completed in 1908.  Designed by architects Joseph and Smithem, it makes it into Pevsner where it is described as: (4)

Six storeys with much consciously pretty detail: roughcast top floor, domed corner towers and Art Nouveau railings.

It’s the Grade II-listed caretaker’s lodge, later transformed into tenants’ meeting rooms and currently being renovated once more, which is perhaps most striking. The flats themselves were adapted in 1964 and again in the mid-1980s (from 85 flats to 48) to provide the larger accommodation then in demand.

Flaxman Terrace Caretaker’s Lodge

In 1906, almost twenty years after its demolition had first been mooted, and against the protests of residents who lacked alternative accommodation, Prospect Place was cleared. Its replacement, also designed by Joseph and Smithem, contained 34 two-bed and 36 three-bed flats and a shared bathhouse made available (at 2d or 4d a time including soap and towels) to other local residents.

The new flats were each contained a WC and a scullery doubling up as a kitchen, the latter: (5)

fitted up with a washing trough and an independent copper for washing clothes, a larder, dresser, coal bunk, a small gas cooking range, and also an improved form of range. By lifting up a shutter in the middle of this range the fire can be transferred into the living room which adjoins the scullery, so that the tenants need only light one fire, which will serve for cooking and heating purposes.

Bedrooms contained ‘a dress cupboard with shelves and pegs for hanging clothes’ and the buildings lit with ‘incandescent gas’.

With rents ranging from 7s (for two rooms on top floor) to 12s for three rooms with the best outlook, the new accommodation was mostly too expensive for the 621 residents displaced. As one local councillor declared on the tenements’ official opening in October 1909:

although they would not be able to take in the submerged tenth which were cleared out of them, of course a better class of working men and women would take them, and the others would be able to take their places.

This notion of ‘filtering up’ was common to advocates of council housing at this time but its practicality is debateable.  Most of those displaced in fact moved to slum housing in the adjacent streets or to another area of very poor housing just to the north in Somers Town.

The new Prospect Terrace did not survive, destroyed by German bombs during the Blitz on the night of October 15/16, 1940.  Thirty-two residents lost their lives and the buildings were rased.  After the War, the LCC took over the land for its Kingsway College which occupies the site presently.

St Pancras Municipal Borough Coat of Arms

The Council had built 210 dwellings by 1914 – a not discreditable total in an era when so little council housing was being built but, as is evident, much remained to be done.  That work would be tackled by more energetic councillors in the years to come when the responsibility of the local and national state to secure the decent housing of its people would be better recognised.  These early years, however, provide a contrast and context for a later period when St Pancras – and its successor authority, Camden – would be among the leading housing providers in the country.

Sources

(1) Stephen W Job, Cat’s Meat Square. Housing and Public Health in South St Pancras 1810-1910, Camden History Society (2012).  Other detail and later quotations, where not otherwise credited, come from the same source.

(2) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, Housing of the Working Classes:  Opening of Goldington Buildings, Great College Street NW By Alderman Thomas Howell Williams Idris (mayor) on Saturday 4 June 1904

(3) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1912

(4) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London: North (1998)

(5) Wellcome Library, London’s Pulse: Report of the Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras, London, Borough of St Pancras 1909

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Regent’s Park Estate, St Pancras: ‘catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’

Tags

1950s, Camden, Gibberd, St Pancras

Imagine knocking down some old Nash Regency terraces to build council houses.  If that idea fills you with horror, you should probably stop reading now.  If, on the other hand, it might capture a democratic moment, a time when we wanted to build houses for the people and cared less about the interests of the few, read on.

Derwent: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

This was the vision of Eric Cook in 1944.  Cook, a left-wing journalist, was the vice-chair of St Pancras Borough Labour Party.  (Elected to the Council in 1945, he died aged only 42 just three years later.) Admittedly, his idea had had some help from the Luftwaffe but the buildings were poorly built (‘by Regency jerry-builders’, he said) and thought at the time to be beyond repair.  Modern bulldozers, he went on, could easily create ‘one of the finest building sites in all Britain…the ideal site for the careful planning of a great sweep of working-class flats, catering for the main bulk and backbone of our people’. (1)

Meanwhile, the Crown Commissioners, who owned the land, were planning luxury flats. (Does that sound familiar?)  To Cook, this was ‘a plan which must be fought and beaten’:

The people of St Marylebone and St Pancras and their borough councils must persuade the Crown Commissioners…that something better can be done with this site.  What an inspiration it would be for the hundred of thousands who come to Regent’s Park every year… if they saw, instead of a restricted number of luxury flats for the very wealthy, right around the ‘outer circle’ of the Park a magnificent sweep of modern flats where people like themselves, service couples and families, had their homes overlooking one of the loveliest of London’s parks.

These initial ideas were too radical and soon watered down but it’s a sign of the times that modified plans were supported by a public meeting of planners and architects held in the nearby headquarters of RIBA and endorsed by Patrick Abercrombie himself. (2)

The Gorell Committee established by the new Labour Government in 1946 to investigate the future of the Regency terraces was, as might be expected, a little less gung-ho.  It recommended seven of the terraces be preserved but accepted the demolition of Someries House (which would later become the site of Lasdun’s Royal College of Physicians’ building), Cambridge Terrace (Nash’s least accomplished work, it said) and Cambridge Gate (a later, 1876, construction ‘of no architectural merit’).  The removal of the latter two would have the: (3)

advantage of opening up the Park for the immediate enjoyment of the inhabitants in a redeveloped area of terraced houses around Munster Square, Clarence Gardens and Cumberland Market [and] would remove a feeling of isolation and of living behind a barrier of more favoured property.

If you wander up the Outer Circle now, you’ll notice that those buildings survive and do, indeed, create a barrier separating the council estate behind from any view – indeed from any sense of adjacency to or ‘ownership’ – of the park which lies so close to hand.

The world wasn’t turned upside down after all.  Normal service was resumed; the privileges of the elite maintained.  Still, St Pancras Borough Council did build its Regent’s Park Estate and we’ll turn now to what was achieved.

The Crown Commissioners agreed to sell some of the land to the east of the Outer Circle and the Council acquired some 69 acres for clearance and redevelopment.  Two elements of Nash’s original scheme – Munster Square and Clarence Gardens, speculative housing for the middle classes gone bad and almost obliterated in the war – were demolished.

In their place the first plan, approved by the Council in 1946, envisaged, in classic Zeilenbau form, a ‘straight, uniform, high block system of flats spaced at intervals of approximately 55 yards’. (4)

Given that even the Council report approving the plan concluded ‘the whole effect is inclined to be one of regimentation’, it’s perhaps not surprising that this scheme was abandoned.  Frederick Gibberd was called on to design a revised lay-out and construction of the first phase of the Estate – Zone A with buildings designed by Gibberd himself – began in 1951.

Hawkshead: Gibberd, Zone A

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

These are the nine-storey T-shaped blocks running along Stanhope Street.  Interspersed among them – at a time when the principles of neighbourhood planning were running strong – were three-storey maisonettes, a nursery, two pubs and a small shopping centre.  The taller buildings were of reinforced concrete frame construction but Gibberd made some effort to add visual interest and variation, using brickwork facings in a chequer-board pattern as well as patterned tiling varied across the blocks.

Stanhope Parade: Gibberd, Zone A

The second phase south of Cumberland Market, along and off Robert Street – actually Zone C – was begun in 1954: 245 flats and six shops and three blocks of 11 storeys, all faced with yellow stock brick, designed by the Davies and Arnold partnership.

Borrowdale: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

The third phase (Zone B) – the work of Thomas Sibthorp, St Pancras Borough Architect – runs along the west side of Augustus Street: two six-storey blocks and one four-storey.

Kendal: Sibthorp, Zone B

Peggy Duff – chair of the Housing Committee from 1956 – later described the new buildings of the Estate as ‘horrible, barrack-type structures’ but most contemporary architectural opinion was kinder.  To the Times’ architectural correspondent, Sibthorp’s Zone C was the most disappointing of the scheme – ‘a step back even when compared with the 30-year-old work alongside’ but he praised other elements of the Estate as ‘far more agreeable’, particularly the designs of Davies and Arnold who had treated their façades more simply than Gibberd and been given greater latitude to vary building heights. (5)

Swallowfield: Armstrong and MacManus

It was the later phases of the overall scheme which most excited contemporary opinion.  Here Edward Armstrong and Frederick MacManus were given scope to depart ‘from the more usual open type of planning with rather loosely sited, separate blocks’, allowing them, it was said, ‘to regain the traditional character of English urban planning which gives a more compact and intimate environment’. (6)

Clarence Gardens: Armstrong and MacManus

The matter of council rents in St Pancras is a whole other story (we’ll write about it another time) but it’s worth noting one oddity here.  Labour had returned to power in St Pancras in 1953 (having narrowly lost to the Conservatives four years earlier), determined to revise the local differential rents scheme.  Its solution was to charge tenants two shillings more the higher their flat was above ground level.  Thus a tenant in one of the top-storey flats of Gibberd’s blocks was paying up to 18 shillings more than a tenant on the ground floor.  Even at a time when high flats were not as reviled as they later became, this seemed a perverse decision and it was abandoned in 1956.

Newby in foreground: Davies and Arnold, Zone C

If you live on the Estate, you can tell me different but it looks in good nick – well-maintained, and attractive overall with its mix of design and aspect and with the ‘touches of colour’ that the Times correspondent noted back in 1955 though enhanced more recently.  It does feel slightly cut off by the Regency terraces to its west and the rather desolate Hampstead Road to its east.  This was an unintended consequence of the failure to ‘knock through’ to the Park but it was taken then to some extent as a positive in creating a ready-made neighbourhood unit.

Of course, there have been many changes since the 1950s. The new Borough of Camden spent £1m on environmental and safety improvements in 1986. In 1990 a ‘£7m Swedish overcoat’ was used to insulate eight renovated blocks.  In 1994 – in a comic irony which probably escaped people at the time – the installation of new security doors was delayed by vandalism. (7)

Pangbourne: Armstrong and MacManus

Demographically, it’s a very different estate too with the ethnic mix you’d expect to find in an inner London borough and a more elderly population – one in five of residents are over 60 according to one sample survey.  Around a quarter of the Estate’s homes are now privately owned.

Ainsdale: Gibberd, Zone A

Most dramatically, the north-western corner of the Estate is threatened by the proposed HS2 development out of Euston.  A minimum of 168 homes face demolition to accommodate existing plans for new lines and station buildings; over 150 more are likely to be affected by the proximity of construction work.  In its opposition to HS2 at least, Camden can make common cause with those in the leafy shires similarly impacted. (8)

Silverdale: Gibberd, Zone A

There’ll be no elite outcry to save Eskdale, Ainsdale and Silverdale blocks in the Regent’s Park Estate from the planners and bulldozers as there was back in the 1940s to save Nash’s Regency terraces  but let’s imagine a world where housing for the ‘main bulk and backbone of our people’ was our first priority as it was briefly in 1945.

Sources

(1) Eric Cook, ‘Big Building Opportunities around Regent’s Park. Will they be seized?’ North London Press, November 24 1944

(2) ‘Development East of Regent’s Park.  Scheme to House 8000’, The Times, October 18 1945

(3)  Gorell Report quoted in CS Bainbridge and Frederick Gibberd, Plan for Saint Pancras (1947)

(4) Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, ‘Regent’s Park Redevelopment Scheme, 1946. A report adopted by the Borough Council on 17 April 1946′

(5) ‘Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left (1971)and ‘Rebuilding In London: Efforts to Avoid Monotony’, The Times, November 28, 1955

(6) St Pancras Borough Council, The Story of the Regent’s Park Redevelopment Area (1955)

(7) London Borough of Camden, Press Releases, 8 September 1986, January 29 1990, 30 June 1994

(8) Camden Council, ‘Regents Park Estate HS2 proposals Regeneration profile’ (ND)

With thanks to the excellent resources and always helpful staff of the Camden Local Studies and Archives department.

The Branch Hill Estate, Camden: ‘the most expensive council housing in the world’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Camden

We were in Camden a few weeks ago – looking at the Alexandra Road estate – to visit that ‘magical moment for English housing’ when the local council was building some of the finest social housing of modern times.

We’re back to take a look at another of its most celebrated projects – the Branch Hill Estate (now Spedan Close) in Hampstead.  First, a warning.  If you go looking for it, it’s hard to find – buried in woodland, in a western section of the famous Heath, down two unmarked lanes – and hard to photograph.  But it’s worth the effort.

Aerial view © Google Earth, Blue Sky Media 2013

Camden Borough Council was formed in 1964, an amalgamation of the former St Pancras, Holborn and Hampstead Borough Councils.  Labour won 34 seats in the first elections for the new borough – 27 from St Pancras and 7 from Hampstead.  Aldermanic seats gave it an overall majority of 42 councillors over the Conservatives’ 28.

So far as the politics of the new Council were concerned: (1)

The general outlook was ‘left of centre’ and a radical activist view pervaded.  The councillors were determined to pursue policies which would further the development of the services transferred from the LCC, promote the physical redevelopment of the Borough and increase the amount of council housing.  The rising level of Council expenditure and of the rates was a secondary consideration to these aims.

That became evident in the development of Branch Hill.

Most of this radicalism came from St Pancras where, a few years earlier, they’d been flying the Red Flag over the Town Hall.  St Pancras had also built proportionately more council houses than any other council in the country in the post-war era and Camden Labour’s 1964 manifesto had pledged to continue ‘this effective housing policy…at rents you can afford’.

It was a young Council too – almost a third of the councillors were under 40 – conscious of its role in the progressive vanguard of London Labour politics.

One major element of the new Council’s housing policy lay in ‘buying any housing they could lay their hands on (some outside the borough)’ on the reasonable grounds that large-scale construction had little impact on council waiting lists when so many needed to be rehoused as a result of the redevelopment itself.  It was also envisaged as a means of halting – or at least slowing – gentrification. Between January 1973 and September 1974, the Council bought 3850 properties.(2)

Soon after completion

But the Council is remembered today for its flagship housing schemes, of which Branch Hill was one – a deliberate statement that council housing and council tenants should not be ghettoised.  Where better than the leafy surrounds of Hampstead to put this principle into practice?

The lower terrace

But such idealism came at a price in Hampstead.  In 1964 the Council paid £464,000 to buy an Edwardian mansion and its grounds off Branch Hill Road on the western edge of the Heath.  The house would become a care home; its land was earmarked for council housing.

The property came with a restrictive covenant stipulating that new buildings must be semi-detached and of no more than two storeys.  It says something for the vision of the Council’s Architects’ Department that they avoided constructing a little piece of suburbia.

The view of the back of the estate from the care home terrace

In fact, the architects, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, schooled by their work with Neave Brown on the Alexandra Road Estate, and guided by Borough Architect Sidney Cook, came up with a scheme that some have likened to an Italian hill town.

That vision had first to survive some difficult politics.  The Conservative administration that ran Camden between 1968 and 1971 intended to sell the land for private development.  When the incoming Labour administration recaptured it for housing, the then Conservative government refused loan support.  The Council began building anyway and were rewarded by a change of government – and financial backing – when Labour won nationally in 1974.

The finished development comprised 21 pairs of two-storey houses in three rows, 20 five-person, 14 six-person and 8 four-person.  These were semi-detached in name only.  In fact, there are essentially three terraces, punctuated with a grid of walkways, built one above the other on the site’s steep slope.

The fabric reflects what had become Camden’s house style – external walls of board marked and smooth white concrete and dark-stained timber joinery, with the addition of red-brick paving for the walkways.

Also in keeping with the Camden style were the gardens and courtyards each house enjoyed.  But the solution was daring – garden patios were built on the roofs of the houses below and accessed from the living room by a bridge.  These were proper gardens, incidentally, with topsoil that allowed planting. A spiral staircase also leads down to a smaller courtyard area at the front of the house.

Reflecting this and to ensure light and views for each property, a split-level kitchen/dining/living room is on the upper floor with a main bedroom to the rear, children’s bedrooms below.  The accommodation conformed to Parker Morris standards but sliding partitions between the main bedroom and living room on the upper floor and between two small bedrooms on the lower floor allowed larger spaces and greater flow.

Underground car park at rear and air vents, also listed.

The estate was completed in 1978 and the first tenants moved in, it was said, ‘without fanfare’ – a choice on the part of the Council which probably reflected the degree of unwanted publicity the scheme had already attracted.

The Hampstead and Highgate Express had earlier concluded: (3)

These are the most expensive council houses in England, to their defenders an act of political faith, to critics socialism gone mad.

And, at over £72,000 each – well over the cost of contemporary private-sector equivalents – they probably were the most expensive council housing ever.  This expenditure reflects the high price of the site, additional works required to cope with difficult soil conditions and the spiralling costs of materials and labour as shortages of both emerged in the mid-seventies.  Building costs generally had escalated threefold in the period.

But principally, of course, it reflects the Council’s determination and the idealism of its architects to provide high-quality social housing.  To critics, this was naturally a provocation.  As one wrote: (4)

this bright young architect’s vision realised is now notorious and a favourite target for politicians and furious ratepayers … conceived as a social time-bomb it is an economic nonsense … it is financially irresponsible, a slap in the eye to the affluent neighbours whose view has been transformed.

Camden’s Tory leader was careful to wish the new tenants well but added that he opposed ‘the blind dogma and appalling waste which caused these houses to be built in the first place’.(5)  Camden Conservatives had earlier criticised the high rents of the new houses which, they argued, ‘made nonsense of Labour’s stated aspiration of “letting ordinary average people live in Hampstead”’.  For its part, Labour blamed the rising costs on building delays caused by the Conservatives’ desire to sell off the land.(6)

The rents were high.  A new tenant of one of the smaller properties paid £31.20 a week, albeit including £9.82 rates and £5.55 heating.  A tenant of a four-bed property paid £37.50 but she received a rent rebate: (7)

If I had to pay the full rent I don’t suppose it would be worth it…The lounge and the dining room and roof garden compensate for the absolutely minute bedrooms”

Which brings us to the crucial question: what did residents think of the estate?

To some extent, they voted with their feet.  Fifteen of the first completed houses were taken on first offer and those early tenants spoke highly of the estate, despite its expense and, in some respects, its inconvenience – there was quite a walk to the nearest shops and public transport.

It is just wonderful here, it is so peaceful. I think it is jolly good value, it is worth it to be up here…

This is something that the everyday person could not think to afford.

The set of sloping steps designed to give access to prams was universally criticised as ‘lethal’ but it has survived.

As has the estate itself, grade II listed in 2010, and with some style – a tribute to its architects and the council which backed them: (8)

I suspect lesser or wiser designers would not have got this far … a matter for reflection for all those that want to do the thing that is right rather than what the unthinking system tells them to do.

Of course, the system may not only be unthinking, it is often crushing.  We remember again that ‘magical moment’ that Camden enjoyed when relative affluence, political will and architectural vision combined to create ‘some of the highest quality council accommodation in the country’.(9)

Sources

(1) Enid Wistrich, Local Government Reorganisation: the First Years of Camden (1972)

(2) Paul Watt, ‘Camden council tenants’ housing experiences and attitudes in the 1990s’. Paper presented to the Mobilising London Housing Histories: the provision of homes since 1850 Conference, 28 June 2013

(3) ‘The Branch Bears Fruit’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 7 October 1977

(4) Quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

(5) Quoted in ‘Branch Hill Bouquets’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 12 May 1978

(6) ‘Tories to blame’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 11 June 1976

(7) Quoted in ‘Branch Hill Bouquets’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 12 May 1978

(8) Official Architecture and Planning, January 1972, quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

(9) The Architects’ Journal , vol 167, 31 May 1978, quoted in British Listed Buildings, Branch Hill Estate, Camden

Modern Architecture London has additional photographs and plans.

See also Fabian Watkinson, The Most Expensive Council Housing in the World, Twentieth Century Society (June 2001)

Thanks too to the Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, the home of much of the material cited above, and its helpful staff.

Aldenham House and Wolcot House, St Pancras: ‘giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had’

Tags

1920s, Camden, St Pancras

You’ll find Aldenham House and Wolcot House on a side road behind Euston station.  There’s nothing particularly striking about them at first glance – it’s the railways that dominate.  Back in the twenties, railways occupied about 16 per cent of the  built area of the Borough of St Pancras and almost one fifth of its male workforce worked in transport. 

Somers Town, 1936: Euston is centre left, the estate just above that. EPW046683 http://www.britainfromabove.org, © English Heritage

They would have been among the better-off working class but the district had pockets of severe poverty too. The 1921 census showed 11,000 people living more than three to a room in St Pancras.  In Somers Town, Little Clarendon Street (shaded black at centre-left in Booth’s map below) had been described by Charles Booth in his Survey of London in 1898 as:

a narrow thoroughfare of bad repute – the worst spot in the immediate neighbourhood and a good many prostitutes and amateurish thieves are living here. The local name for the street is ‘Little Hell’.

Little Clarendon Street was renamed Wolcot Street but its older designation, Little Hell, stuck.  In 1921, its 91 houses, now 120 years old, were described as ‘very dilapidated, neglected, insanitary, verminous and dangerous’ and scheduled for demolition by the council.

That council had been won by Labour in 1919 and in the immediate post-war years St Pancras was in the forefront of local authority building efforts.  Its largest scheme, the Brookfield Estate, was completed in 1922 and comprised some 205 flats, maisonettes and cottages.  But its rents – running from 19s 9d (99p) to 29s 3d (£1.46) – were said to be unaffordable to poorer local residents.

In 1922, reflecting national trends, St Pancras Labour lost 22 seats.  It would not regain power until 1945 and a new era of politics. The Municipal Reformers (the Conservative Party by any other name) took over.  Housing efforts slowed but the Aldenham and Wolcot House scheme was completed and it is arguable that the political complexion of the council lent an interesting cast to its completion.

Aldenham House from the corner of Eversholt Street

In total, the new development comprised four blocks – a fifth would be added later – providing 88 tenements: 24 two-room, 56 three-room and 8 four-room.  The blocks were placed, according to the scheme’s architect, AJ Thomas, ‘in such a manner as to admit the greatest amount of sunshine, with a free and open circulation of air and ample playing ground for children’.

Courtyard between Wolcot House and Aldenham House

They were constructed of London stock brick with red brick axed arches and quoins to windows and angles, blue Staffordshire plinths and artificial Portland stone bands, key stones and copings.  Boxed sash windows, described as ‘of the Queen Anne character’, were said to give the whole a ‘general effect of dignified domestic dwellings’.

Wolcot House, side view

Internally the kitchens were large.  They had to be as they accommodated ‘a larder, fitted dresser, gas stove, gas copper, bath and cover table, and a ten-inch deep sink with tile skirting’.  A central hall contained a separate WC and small coal bunker.  Living rooms contained a ‘convertible stove’ which could be used either as an open fire or a supplementary means of cooking and hot water supply.

Mr Thomas went on:

The scheme of decoration has been influenced by the desire to create cheerfulness and encourage cleanliness, all wood floors being stained creosote on the surface against vermin and decay.  The floors can be polished and easily kept clean, and the staining economises use of linoleum.

Stained creosote floors don’t sound particularly cheering but if they helped the housewives of the day keep their homes clean perhaps that was a sufficient reason to be cheerful.

Wolcot House, courtyard view

This is perhaps typical, though not advanced, municipal housing of the period. Some Labour activists inveighed against ‘barracks-like’ tenement blocks (see my earlier piece on the Wilson Grove Estate in Bermondsey) but in inner London –  where space was at a premium – they were generally seen as unavoidable.

A more interesting and unusual aspect of the scheme was the Council’s expressed desire to rehouse all those displaced by the area’s slum clearance. Alderman Collins, the chair of the Health Committee responsible for the development, stated:

in no instance in the Metropolitan area had the possibility of actual rehousing be carried out with such intensity of purpose; the actual persons unhoused had been provided for in every case, a result of which the Borough Council was most proud.

A few tenants, not accommodated on the estate itself, were provided houses on the London County Council schemes in Becontree, Downham and Burnt Oak.

In what might have been a not unjustified dig at his Labour opponents, he went on:

the Council believed that with perseverance and courage it would achieve something in giving the poor Somers Town people the first real chance they have ever had.  Borough Councils had built houses for the respectable, they attracted the nice people, and the people for whom the houses were intended never got there; but in this instance those who had lived in the old houses were now living in the new – a genuine transition.

We might pause here and note that characterisation.  It was the case that early council housing did overwhelmingly cater for the ‘nice people’ – the respectable working-class with, for the most part, steady if unspectacular incomes.  A council tenancy was seen as a sign of upward mobility, it might even promote a certain snobbery.  If we deprecate the latter, we might nonetheless embrace the idea of social housing as aspirational, as something more than a safety-net to catch a so-called ‘sink’ population.

Old and new signage

The commitment to rehouse poorer tenants, nevertheless, provided a challenge to the Council:

Wolcot Street tenants are not the class of tenant usually chosen for the Council’s flats, and hence the need for special consideration in surmounting the difficulties.  It must not be supposed that the tenants are bad; they are very hard-working people, struggling to make ends meet and accustomed to paying low rentals.

In fact, the rents – ranging from 13s 8d (69p) for two-roomed to 18s 8d (94p) for three-roomed tenements – were not that low and it was assumed rent collection would present difficulties.  The Council resorted to special measures – they appointed two ‘lady surveyors’, Mrs Irene Barclay and Miss Evelyn Perry.

Mrs Barclay, courtesy of the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, had been the first women in Britain to qualify as a chartered surveyor and would be a significant figure in social housing through her pioneering surveys and active involvement in local housing associations.

We must assume the choice of these two women represented a belief in a ‘woman’s touch’. The Council professed itself:

fully conscious that the experiment would necessitate patience and help on their part.  There could be no magic, for they realised how slow progress is when changes of so radical a nature were made in the lives of people who seemed to be content for so many years with the misery of their surroundings.

In a world where strong women were making their name in ‘caring’ roles in the domestic sphere – frequently as councillors with a special interest in infant welfare and the health of the mother, for example – we should overlook the peculiar mix of paternalism and sexism here.

Original signage on Wolcot House

The scheme was officially opened by Princess Mary, the daughter of the reigning monarch George V, on 25 July 1928. The local press reported how the new tenants ‘crowded the windows and balconies, and, by the display of flags and cheering, showed their loyalty and added to the general interest and enthusiasm’.

We should assume there was a genuine pride and patriotism on display here.  The tenants organised a whip-round to purchase their own bouquet for their distinguished visitor and a ballot was held to determine who would have the honour of presenting it – Mr and Mrs Crapper of no. 14 and Mr and Mrs Tippett of no. 18 were the lucky ones.

Naturally, the local great and the good were in attendance too.  The Metropolitan Police Band provided musical entertainment.  And Alderman Collins got to make the speech from which I have quoted extensively above.

 Sources

The detail and quotations above are taken from the programme published by St Pancras Borough Council to mark the ‘Official Opening of Aldenham House and Wolcot House, Somers Town, by HRH the Princess Mary, 25 July 1928’.

My thanks to Camden Local History Library for their help in locating this and other sources.

The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden: ‘a magical moment for English housing’

Tags

1960s, 1970s, Camden, Neave Brown

In the sixties, London was swinging and Harold Wilson had promised a new Britain forged in the ‘white heat’ of a technological revolution.  That may have been hype but something of it resonates when you look at Camden’s Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate – Alexandra Road or even Rowley Way to its friends.  There was hope in the air and Camden was well placed to capture it.

The Metropolitan Borough of Camden was formed in 1964 and comprised the former boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras – respectively intellectual, wealthy and radical. It was also the third richest borough in London in terms of rateable value.(1)  Add the politics of a young  and ambitious Labour council, for whom ‘the main aim was more housing – beginning and end’ and conscious of its flagship role, and that made for some of the most exciting council housing of modern times.(2)

Rowley Way in the 1970s © Martin Charles

The Council found in Sydney Cook, Borough Architect, and the team he recruited people with the vision and ideological drive to match its ambitions.  Cook rejected the system-building then in vogue as the means to build as much as cheaply as possible – ‘I’ll use standardised plans if you can find me a standardised site,’ he said.(3)  And he rejected high-rise, particularly the tower blocks set in open landscape popular at the time.

In Neave Brown, the architect of Alexandra Road, he found an ally. Brown wanted to: (4)

build low, to fill the site, to geometrically define open space, to integrate.  And to return to housing the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.

For non-architects, this was a call to return to the traditional values of terraced housing – not necessarily working-class housing, the Royal Crescent in Bath was another role model – in which each dwelling had a front door to the street and its own open space with a view of the sky.

Alexandra Road in its heyday

Before the development, Alexandra Road was an area of some 600 decaying Victorian villas, scheduled for demolition.  Residents mounted fierce opposition to a commercial redevelopment plan which projected three fourteen-storey high tower blocks.  The developer  withdrew and the Council purchased the 13.5 acres for social housing purposes in 1966.

The basic design of the finished estate was determined in 1968 but met resolute opposition from Camden’s Planning Department which believed a low-rise development could not achieve the population density required.  The policy brief stipulated 136 persons per acre, Planning asked for 150, Brown won the day by promising 210 – a figure higher than most high-rise schemes achieve.

The Council (under Conservative control from 1968 to 1971) approved the scheme in April 1969 and planning permission was granted the following year.  One last hurdle was overcome when a 1972 public enquiry approved the pedestrianisation of the road against objections from Westminster residents.

A final budget was set at £7.15m.  Building began in 1972, the first residents moved in in 1978 and the estate as a whole was completed in 1979.  But not before myriad difficulties involving the 175 contractors, a layer of soft clay causing huge problems with foundations and a massive burst water main.  Construction costs were also raised by the shortages of materials and labour.  The overall price of the scheme ballooned to £20.9m – though this did include significant additional works in the provision of a youth club and play centre, for example.

Rowley Way today

Not surprisingly, the eventual expense of the development and its high maintenance costs were widely criticised. Ken Livingstone, who became chair of Camden’s Housing Committee in 1978 and no friend to those now regarded as Camden Labour’s old guard, set up a public enquiry to investigate.  It criticised the Council’s project management procedures.  Others blamed excessive architects’ fees.  A less blameworthy factor is simply the quality and ambition of the estate’s design.

Architect’s drawing of the estate

There are excellent architectural descriptions of the estate which I won’t attempt to match here but in brief it comprises two parallel pedestrianised streets and three, 300 metre-long, terraces.  The largest of these, seven storeys high, backs on to the West Coast mainline, and is built ziggurat-style, high at the rear, to block the noise of passing trains.

The rear of the seven-storey Rowley Way block

Two other four-storey blocks, run parallel, and between them is a four acre park.

Four-storey block, Rowley Way

Ainsworth Way: the rear of the four-storey block skirting the park

The estate as a whole is constructed of site-cast board-marked white, unpainted reinforced concrete with black-stained timber joinery.  But any starkness here was to be offset by profuse greenery and the estate has managed this pretty well, leading one critic to describe Alexandra Road – he argued the vegetation was being used to hide the architects’ mistakes – as the ‘hanging gardens of Camden’.(5)

Rowley Way

Internally, the two-storey dwellings have bedrooms on the lower floor and living rooms on the upper. Each living room has an external balcony with fully glazed sliding doors.  Sliding walls allow the interior space to be subdivided.

In all, 520 dwellings were provided, housing some 1660 people.  Now the key question.  Beyond the architectural hype, what has been the experience of the estate’s residents?

The park in 1983, Rowley Way to right

To begin with, it was positive.  The Council feared the estate would be unpopular but 137 of the first 278 prospective tenants accepted tenancies and they were said to be impressed by the ceramic-tiled kitchens, huge picture windows and sliding wall partitions – and by the central heating hidden inside the walls.  Some dubbed it the Costa del Alexandra and one early resident at least didn’t begrudge her £23.50 a week rent – ‘It’s just like being on the Riviera’, she said.(6)

As severe teething problems developed, chiefly with the heating system, that comment came to seem ironic.  Each heated wall served two flats and residents complained about extremes of heat.  One particularly vituperative article in the Camden Tenant was headlined ‘How to rent a sauna bath and a freezer at the same time’.  It went on to complain about crumbling concrete, railway noise and insect infestation and concluded ‘all in all, this estate represents a disaster of the first magnitude and I for one will be moving.'(7)

The heating problems were admitted and hard to fix with the Council eventually agreeing to pay half the affected tenants’ heating bills till the matter was resolved.  The difficulties with concrete in the British climate are more intractable and were exacerbated in the 1980s by the Council’s poor maintenance of what was always understood as a construction that would need some looking after.  Current views of the concrete are mixed, ranging from ‘I think it’s quite brave and brutal’ to ‘it just looks dull’.(8)

Some weathered concrete on an unforgiving grey day

By the late eighties, the estate had also come to be viewed as unsafe – the incidence of both reported and unreported crime said to be significantly higher than in surrounding streets and estates.  A contemporary survey placed blame on the ‘complex design and layout of the estate’.  But, in hindsight, it seems as realistic to look at wider social problems as any particular issues with the estate itself.(9)

In 1989 tenant disgruntlement with Camden’s management led to their vote to place the day-to-day management of the estate in the hands of the South Hampstead Housing Cooperative.  An £8m refurbishment project was awarded to a firm of private architects.  In the event, the contract was taken over by the Council and completed by in-house architects and the estate as a whole returned to Council management in 2005.

In 1994, well before the thirty years normally required before a building may be listed, the estate was listed Grade II* to ensure any refurbishment matched original specifications.  It was described by Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, as ‘one of the most distinguished groups of buildings in England since the Second World War’.

Architecturally, despite the weathering, the estate remains impressive – a worthy site of pilgrimage for students of modern architecture, some of whom wax lyrical. For the modernist architect John Winter:(9)

Between the system building spree of the sixties and the late seventies slide into folksiness there was a magical moment for English housing when eminently habitable places of clarity and calm were designed and built…Camden has contributed richly to this scene.

Residents’ views remain mixed.  Some liken it to Alcatraz.  One resident describes it more imaginatively as ‘an enormous concrete crocodile that has been in an accident’.  On the other hand, there’s the resident who claims, with a little poetic licence, that they ‘live in a penthouse apartment in a Grade II-listed building in St Johns Wood’.(10)  For others, it is simply home and it is described overwhelmingly as a friendly, neighbourly estate. 

Keeping our feet on the ground, it’s hard not to admire the enterprise and idealism of those responsible for Alexandra Road.  It couldn’t happen now and according to Neave Brown it only happened then because of:(11)

the youthfulness and energy of the people involved, and also because the various figures of authority in the Council were relatively young and inexperienced.

There’s a pleasure in remembering that this vision was committed to public sector housing, so often underfunded, so often marginalised, that makes it easy to forgive some of the missteps and extravagance along the way.  As of 2012, only 18 per cent of the estate’s flats were leasehold so the estate remains social housing in the truest sense.

Martin Pawley, writing with prescience in 1990, compared Alexandra Road to:

an epic silent film. It suffers from having been released into a different world to that in which it was conceived…set on the very cusp of the change from socialism to the me-generation.

Sources

(1) David Kohn, Quality and Quantity, BDOnline, November 5 2010

(2) Cllr Enid Wistrich quoted in Mark Swenarton, ‘Reforming the Welfare State: Camden 1965-73’, Footprint Journal (Delft Architecture Theory Journal), 9, Autumn 2011

(3) Cook quoted in Fabian Watkinson, The Most Expensive Council Housing in the World, Twentieth Century Society (June 2001)

(4) Andrew Freer, ’Alexandra Road: the last great social housing project’, AA Files, 30, Autumn 1995

(4a) Reyner Banham, quoted in the above.

(5) Hampstead and Highgate Express, 20 January 1978

(6) Camden Tenant, Summer 1982

(7) Residents’ quotes taken from the film One Below The Queen: Rowley Way Speaks for Itself

(8) Unit for Architectural Studies, University College London, April, 1992 ‘A High Quality and Secure Environment? – An appraisal of the pattern of public space in the Ainsworth and Alexandra Road Housing Estate’, cited in Alexandra Road Park Conservation Management Plan, July 2012

(9) Quoted in Fabian Watkinson, The Most Expensive Council Housing in the World, Twentieth Century Society (June 2001)

(10) Quoted in Camden New Journal, ‘Film…a candid look at Neave Brown’s iconic Swiss Cottage housing estate’, 27 May 2010

(11) Quoted in Andrew Freer,’ Alexandra Road: the last great social housing project’, AA Files, 30, Autumn 1995

(12) Martin Pawley, ‘Living on the Edge of Time’, The Guardian, 2 April 1990

Check out Single Aspect’s blog entry on Alexandra Road too for additional references.

Thanks too to the Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, the home of much of the material cited above, and its helpful staff.

The Ossulston Estate, St Pancras: the English Karl Marx-Hof?

Tags

1920s, 1930s, Camden, LCC, Multi-storey, St Pancras

If you’re anywhere near the British Library, do take some time to step just to the west where you’ll see one of the most remarkable council estates of the interwar period.

The English disdain for multi-storey living is well-documented and frequently lamented, not least by those for whom ‘modern’ ideas of planning and functionalism have held sway. So the Ossulston Estate constructed between 1927 and 1931 generated much excitement and is seen, even in retrospect, as a rare – though modest – British exemplar of the daring architectural ideas pioneered in the Karl Marx-Hof of Red Vienna. The truth is a little more complex but the concept and execution remain impressive.

Not the Ossulston Estate: the Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna (built 1927-1930) (c) Wikimedia Commons

In the massive wave of building that took place after World War One when ‘homes for heroes’ were demanded and social housing was seen as the only viable means of providing sufficient, most larger-scale development took place along ‘garden suburb’ lines. The view – widely shared and strongly held within the labour movement itself – was that workers’ families needed houses and gardens.

An estimable principle and one that was powerfully resurrected after the perceived failure of much of the high-rise housing of the 1960s. But a problematic one also. Such low density housing was not cost-effective and was generally expensive to rent. It worked well for the better-off working class in stable employment but did little to tackle the mass of slum housing which remained and less to address the needs – and means – of its inhabitants. The London County Council, under the leadership of the Municipal Reform (Conservative) Party from 1907 to 1934, in particular, was criticised by many for its dilatory approach to this vital issue.

This was one context for the Ossulston Estate. Another was the peculiarities of its site – 8.8 acres but awkwardly set out in a long ribbon of land, 450 yards long by 84 wide. The LCC’s chief architect, George Topham Forrest, concluded ‘the only way, in the circumstances, the full utilisation of the land can be obtained is by building higher than the normal five storeys.’

A contemporary view of the Estate which illustrates the difficult site. (The British Library can be seen at the top of the photo.)

But such higher rise accommodation also entailed additional expenditures (on lifts, for example – only one LCC development had needed a lift to date: a block in the Tabard Street Estate). Such expenditures might be offset by higher rentals but these, of necessity, could come only from privately rented shops, offices or flats.

Topham proposed just such a mixed-use, public-private development. It was a highly unusual concept at the time but one that also appealed to the politics of the Municipal Reformers.

And that, in typically pragmatic and idiosyncratic fashion was the genesis of what might have been ‘the first comprehensive redevelopment sponsored by a local authority, as well as the first high-rise council flats’ in Britain (1). The Ossulston Estate owed less to vision than practicality and, in the event, even the modest vision of its conception was compromised. But this isn’t a sneer; if anything it’s a celebration of pragmatism at a time when ideology was about to wreak the most terrible havoc in mainland Europe.

Topham’s original 1925 design envisaged ground floor shops, first floor offices, then two floors with ‘flats of a character superior to the ordinary working-class dwellings’ with five floors of working-class accommodation above. There were no fancy ideas of social mixing here. Topham continued:

It is an essential of this idea that the superior flats should be segregated from the shops and working-class flats. Each class of property should have its own entrance and the entrances should be as remote from one another as possible.

Central heating was also to be provided. (Another practical solution to a real-world problem – the difficulties of hauling up and storing coal and disposing of ash.)

Topham altered these plans in his 1927 scheme which did reflect his study of the Viennese examples. His crucial modification was to create a broken roofline by constructing blocks of three to six storeys with two nine-storey towers interposed – ‘the best way of giving the new accommodation the greatest possible supply of light and air’. A rooftop play area calculated on some formula to provide space for 1880 children was also part of the overall plan which would accommodate some 3054 persons in 492 flats at a cost of £400,000.

Neville Chamberlain who, had history been kinder, might be remembered as a reforming Minister of Health and Housing, laid the foundation stone of the first block (named then and now Chamberlain House) on 1 February 1928.

Cecil Levita, the chairman of the LCC’s Housing Committee who also gave his name to one of the blocks, spoke of ‘a noteworthy scheme which would mark a new departure in the construction of buildings’.

In the event, the law (government subsidies were not available to mixed-use schemes) and economics (private rental incomes were judged insufficient to cross-subsidise working-class accommodation) combined to torpedo the larger ideas. Private accommodation was omitted and six-story blocks of exclusively working-class flats constructed.

Levita House

Entrance to Chamberlain House originally intended as the entry to the premium flats

The Somers Town Pub: the Estate was quite unusual for the time in incorporating public houses

Walker House begun in 1929-30

Nevertheless, the treatment – steel-frame construction, unadorned rough-cast walls, reinforced concrete balconies and an overall aesthetic – remained modernist and exciting to an emergent generation of planners impatient with the conservatism of British design and aspiration (2).

Architecturally it is pleasing. The blocks stand in the form of a huge military cross, with big squares happy in the possession of trees. Windows look out on to the central courtyards and the outer sides are lined with balconies of reinforced concrete, approximating in design to the models in Vienna which have been so greatly admired.

It was a far cry from the ‘Municipal Neo-Georgian’ then typical of most local government architecture.

The courtyard to Walker House, completed in more traditional brick in 1937

The Estate is now Grade II listed but it’s enjoyed a chequered history. Long years of neglect led to tenants’ protests against ‘inhuman living conditions’ in 1982. Camden Borough Council – which inherited the complex from the GLC in the 1980s – acknowledged serious disrepair in 2004 and a £6m scheme followed which created 44 new homes ‘from 66 cramped damp and outmoded flats in the original building’.

The Camden press release, headlined ‘Making a “slum” into family homes again’, offers a stark reminder of changing fashions, heightening expectations and the depredations of time but it’s a mark too of the continuing struggle to provide affordable, good quality homes to the less well-off.

Sources:

(1) Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’

(2) The quote is from Hugh Quigley and Ismay Goldie, Housing and Slum Clearance in London (1934).

The major source for this piece is Simon Pepper, ‘Ossulston Street: Early LCC Experiments in High-Rise Housing, 1925-1929’ from the London Journal, vol 7, no 1 1981. Pepper also provides a commentary to the Twentieth Century Society page on the Estate.  Some photographs have been taken with permission from Andrew Amesbury’s thoughtful and interesting blog entry on the Estate. Listed building information on Chamberlain House and Levita House is available online.