Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing 2018

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All are welcome at Mark’s lecture, given for RIBA Oxfordshire in aid of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. The Trust works with disadvantaged young people, giving them the opportunities that Stephen himself was denied. The RIBA is marking the Trust’s 20th anniversary and 25 years since Stephen Lawrence’s death through fundraising events. Why Cook? Well, Sydney Cook was borough architect in Camden and a man who oversaw some of the most notable and influential social housing schemes of the 20th century in the area.

The housing projects built in Camden in the 1960s and 1970s when Sydney Cook was borough architect are widely regarded as the most important urban housing built in the UK in the past 100 years. Cook recruited some of the brightest talent available in London at the time and the schemes - which included Alexandra Road, Branch Hill, Fleet Road, Highgate New Town and Maiden Lane - set out a model of housing that continues to command interest and admiration from architects to this day. All the estates have elements in common, like variations on a theme: a post-Corbusian aesthetic, highly articulated sections, including the use of ziggurat and split-level designs, and intelligent interior planning frequently incorporating sliding partitions, dark stained timber strip windows, and ingenious storage. Together they make up a body of work that is among the best housing built anywhere in the world at that time.Elsfield, Highgate Road,1968, Bill Forrest. Rightly seen as a component of Moderninsm in Metro-Land, is however an experiment too far. Yet this double-terrace is only one part of the complex. Across a large landscaped green space there is another 3-story terrace of houses that runs alongside an existing estate from the 1930s and mirrors the railside environment, while at the far end of the estate there is a low-rise building that accommodates a school for children with special needs and other community programs. In its bringing together of diverse functions as part of a single, massive designed environment, Alexandra Road can be seen as one of the defining projects of mid-century architectural ambition, a form of urban megastructure, the “last great social housing project,” in the words of Andrew Freear. 8 The housing projects built in Camden in the 1960s and 1970s when Sydney Cook was borough architect – including Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road, Benson Forsyth’s Branch Hill and Peter Tábori’s Highgate New Town - set out a model of street-based housing that continues to command admiration to this day.

See Stefi Orazi, Modernist Estates: The buildings and the people who live in them (London: Frances Lincoln, 2015). The book includes interviews with residents of the Camden estates. Neave Brown, who lived in Fleet Road until his death in January 2018, was one of those interviewed. The architecture of today that again claims to be a reinterpretation of the terrace tradition, the so-called New London Vernacular, is far more conventional in form, proportion, material, and general decorum . It has been widely discussed in recent years, and represents not just architects’ interest in historic types but also the economics of building materials and developers’ taste for planning risk. See Urban Design London, A New London Housing Vernacular.In hindsight, we can see that the West was undergoing a seismic change from what [Eric] Hobsbawm called the “golden age” of post-war welfare capitalism, marked by plenty and consensus, to the “crisis decades” of the 1970s and ’80s. 11 The extraordinary run of architectural achievement at Camden Council would prove short-lived. Appendix 1 'Sydney Cook as I knew him' recollections by Neave Brown, Frank Dobson, John Green, Martin Morton and Peter Tábori My mother, Millie Miller, one of Camden’s first councillors in 1964, an admirer of Cook and his work, was then leader of the council. But it was Brown’s next project that would put Camden Council on the architectural map. Alexandra Road is not only the boldest and most celebrated of all the estates; it was also the project in which Brown most fully realized his ambition “to show what a modern piece of city building could be.”