Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing 2018

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Those schemes included Alexandra Road, Branch Hill, Fleet Road, Highgate New Town and Maiden Lane, with design work carried out by some of the most forward-thinking architects of the era, including Neave Brown, Benson & Forsyth and Peter Tabori, along with Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. Mark Swenarton’s meticulously compiled book, Cook’s Camden, describes who and how. It reads like 12 books in one." —Bernard Miller, Camden New Journal

AS an uncertain 60s teenager consulting Sydney Cook, Camden’s borough architect, about studying architecture, I doubted I had the maths. While Cook’s Camden focuses on buildings and urban design, it reveals Cook’s greatest design and construction achievement as not the wonderful, often award-winning housing he bequeathed to Camden, frequently against technical, financial and political odds, but the team he created to achieve that goal.One especially strong contribution to this reevaluation is Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, a definitive account, by historian Mark Swenarton, of the radically experimental public housing estates designed and built by Camden Council from 1966 to 1975." — Places Journal Books Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton The announcement, last fall, that the Royal Institute of British Architects was awarding the 2018 Gold Medal to Neave Brown, came as a stunning surprise. Not only had the architect, who died earlier this month, attained his greatest success decades ago, as the designer of social housing in London in the 1960s and ’70s; he’d also seen his masterwork, the Alexandra Road council estate, become notorious as the focus of a lengthy public inquiry into wasteful public spending — an inquiry that would effectively end his career as an architect in Britain. But the RIBA award can also be seen as part of a larger historic rehabilitation. Dismissed for decades as politically impractical and aesthetically compromised, the housing production of mid-century local authorities is now being vigorously reevaluated in our own era of unaffordable cities and triumphant privatization. One especially strong contribution to this reevaluation is Cook ’ s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, a definitive account, by historian Mark Swenarton, of the radically experimental public housing estates designed and built by Camden Council from 1966 to 1975. The housing production of mid-century local authorities is now being reevaluated in our own era of unaffordable cities and triumphant privatization.

Due to their dramatic forms and rough concrete, the Camden estates have often been used as filming locations for crime dramas, acting as visual shorthand for dangerous inner-city landscapes. The proposition of Alexandra Road was that, by drawing on the way in which London and other English cities had been composed, a modern urbanism could be generated without creating a rupture with either the existing grain of the city or the prevailing way of life. 7 Alexandra Road is one of most impressive spatial environments in London, vast and dramatic, but clearly domestic in composition. 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. 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. The housing projects built by the London Borough of Camden in the years 1965-73 belong arguably to the most substantial investigations into the architecture of social housing undertaken in the past half-century. Under borough architect Sydney Cook, Camden aimed to establish a new kind of housing architecture based, not on the Corbusian tabula rasa, but on a radical reinterpretation of traditional ... [Show full abstract] English urbanism.Swenarton, 278. The listings of the estate agent The Modern House frequently include properties in the Camden estates. Andrew Freear, “Alexandra Road: The last great social housing project,” AA Files, vol. 30, 1995, 35. It is worth remembering that Reyner Banham was snobbishly critical of “institutional megastructures” built by the state, such as Alexandra Road. See Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 192. Today the estates are far from pristine, but their landscaping has matured beautifully and they are extremely popular, both with their council tenants and a steadily growing population of leaseholders and private renters. Where once they were endlessly used as locations for crime dramas, now you are just as likely to find fashion shoots there.

Cook’s Camden is a vital history of a remarkable human achievement, and should be read by anyone with an interest in housing architecture, and what can be achieved for ordinary people." —Douglas Murphy, Architecture Today 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. This was not merely an after-effect of Le Corbusier’s infamous polemic that town planners must “kill the street.” It was rooted in contemporary policies — detailed in the 1963 government report, Traffic in Towns — that recommended separating cars and pedestrians. 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. Sydney Cook took up his appointment at Camden — one of the richest yet also most diverse boroughs in London, formed from the merger of Holborn, Hampstead, and St. Pancras — just as the reaction against mixed development was gaining momentum. It was, as Swenarton writes, a heady time, a “period of optimism and ambition in the western world.”But Cook’s illness was only part of the problem. By the mid 1970s, the U.K. was in the grip of severe recession, and new austerities were being everywhere imposed. Cost reductions eliminated much of the sophistication of Benson and Forsyth’s design. The passage of the Homeless Persons Act, in 1977, was a further complication; the new law required the councils to prioritize the needs of the homeless, which meant that Maiden Lane became home to tenants with complex and pressing requirements. “The result,” writes Swenarton, “was that Maiden Lane soon acquired a reputation as a sink estate.” 9 “Not as the friend but the foe of public good”

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. The outcome was a series of projects, including Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane, designed by members of Cook’s team, including Neave Brown, Peter Tábori and Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, as well as projects designed by up-and-coming private architects like Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. The Cook of the book’s title was that now-extinct figure: a borough architect. Sydney Cook (1910–1979) spent almost his entire career in public service, starting in the late 1930s as an architectural assistant for a borough council and rising steadily through the ranks. His appointment as council architect for the Borough of Camden, in 1964, came at an opportune and exciting moment. In retrospect it can be seen within a larger historical context, the long period of idealism and energy following the end of the Second World War, what some economists call the Trente glorieuses — the three decades during which social goals were leading motivators of public policy.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