Description

The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate, or Alexandra Road as it is generally known, is the most ambitious of the housing projects constructed by the London Borough of Camden during its “golden years” of 1965–1973 when Sydney Cook (1910–1979) was in charge of the borough’s architectural department. It is also the most celebrated of the housing projects designed by Neave Brown (1929–2017). The project was largely designed in 1967–1969 but because of delays in tendering, construction only started in 1972 and was completed in 1979.

Brown conceived Alexandra Road as a corrective to the kind of council housing being built at the time. The officially endorsed format, i.e. “mixed development,” combined high-rise blocks of flats (for childless households) with two-story dwellings (for families with children) with individual gardens where the children could play. But as an influential 1962 report demonstrated, in practice families with young children lived in the towers as well, with detrimental effects on both the children and the parents. To counteract this, Brown wanted to deliver a form of housing based on streets where, as in a traditional city, the street formed both the place of social interaction and the point at which you moved from the public realm to the private — in other words, “front doors on streets.”

Brown adopted a “mat” or “carpet” model for the project and, building to the extremities of the site, achieved a significant density (395 persons per hectare) without rising more than 3.5 stories above the ground. Essentially, the figure-ground of a “mixed development” scheme was inverted: instead of the building forming the figure and the site forming the ground, the building formed the ground and figure was formed by the open space excavated from it: communal gardens, individual gardens, and the narrow pedestrian alleys leading to the front doors. A manifesto by Brown, “The Form of Housing,” written to accompany the publication of the design in September 1967, explained the general principles.[1]

The 6.6-hectare Alexandra Road site was bounded between the main London-Birmingham railway running along its northern edge and a 1950s housing estate to the south. As well as housing (522 dwellings) the project included a 1.8-hectare public park, a school, home for handicapped children, shops, light industry, a community center, a play center, and a youth club. At Alexandra Road, Brown wanted to create a modern urbanism that did not break with either the existing grain of the city or the way of life of the people who lived there. As in Bloomsbury, Pimlico, and other parts of 18th and 19th-century London, there would be a continuous public space formed by streets and squares, with the edges of the public space defined by the housing, the houses being entered directly from the street, and every dwelling having its own private open-to-the-sky external space.

In essence, Brown’s concept was to treat the entire site as a continuous pedestrian zone comprising streets, squares, and park, with vehicles relegated below ground. Running along the north was the main pedestrian street, Rowley Way, with on one side the 400-meter-long Block A (6.5 stories), cantilevering over the railway, and on the other the lower Block B (four stories), adjacent to the park. The section of Block A stacked five dwellings one above the other: 1.5-story duplex at the bottom, three levels of flats on the inter-mediate floors, and a two-story duplex at the top — with a step-back in the section to give each dwelling its own open-to-the-sky exter- nal terrace, complete with concrete planter. Block B comprised two double-story duplexes one above the other, the lower with its own garden facing the park and the upper with its own terrace, opening off the living room and overlooking the street. Access to all dwellings was from the pedestrian street, with more than 100 staircases connecting the front doors of the upper dwellings to the street (in addition, five lifts in Block A gave direct access to the walkway connecting the upper duplexes). To the south of the park was another pedestrian street, much smaller in scale, which similarly provided access to a third row of housing, Block C (three-story houses).

At the heart of the scheme was the 1.8-hectare public park. For Brown, the park formed “the centre of a continuous pedestrian urban architecture” and, as in 18th-century London, it was “the picture in the frame” formed by the adjacent buildings. Brown designed the park as a series of distinct spaces, each with a different use and character (open play space, play area for younger children/older children, open-air amphitheater, etc.), with each space configured diagonally to make it feel bigger.

Despite the programmatic complexity of the project, encompassing infrastructure as well as residential and public buildings, a consistent palette of materials was used throughout: concrete for the walls, roof, and structure and dark-stained timber for doors and windows. The external walls were finished in board-marked white unpainted concrete, while to counter the effects of the passing trains, the cross walls of the block next to the railway were mounted on 18-meter-deep, 1-meter-diameter piles with steel/rubber anti-vibration pads. Cast into the 178-mm-thick cross walls were the pipe coils of an innovative heating system designed by services engineer Max Fordham, which converted the cross walls into low-output radiators, heated by a central boiler located in the D-grid block.

The dwellings were in continuous terraces (rows) fronting onto pedestrian streets, with front doors accessed from the street. Every dwelling had its own open-to-the-sky external space of at least 9 m2 opening from the living room. The two-story dwellings follow an “upside down” principle, with the living room and kitchen on the upper floor and bedrooms below (so that nobody would have the living room or kitchen of their upstairs neighbors immediately above their bedroom). Extensive use was made of sliding partitions to facilitate family living — for example between the kitchen/dining area and living areas, so that some family members could watch television while others did their homework. Block A comprised two-bedroom four-person (2B/4P) duplexes on the top floors, 1B/2P flats on the intermediate floors, and 3B/5P duplexes on the bottom floors. Block B comprised 2B/3P duplexes above and 3B/4P duplexes below. Block C comprised 4B/6P houses. Internal floor sizes ranged from 50 m2 for the 1B/2P flats to 115 m2 for the 4B/6P houses.

Features like the large private terraces for every flat proved as attractive to prospective tenants —nurses, teachers, postmen, railway workers — as Brown had anticipated. Originally all the dwellings were rented to tenants of Camden council. But under the “right to buy” policy introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, all council tenants were permitted to purchase their homes at a discount of up to 50 percent, with the right to sell them on the open market after a few years. Today at Alexandra Road about one in five have transferred out of council ownership, with many being sold on to “young creatives” — architects, designers, and journalists — attracted by the outstanding design of the homes and (for London) the relatively reasonable prices.

While externally there have been some unsympathetic interventions (lighting, surface-mounted cabling etc.), overall, the fabric today is in reasonable condition, thanks largely to the vigilance of residents who care deeply about their estate. In 1993, the estate was listed, the first post-war housing estate ever. In 2017, shortly before he died, Brown was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for architecture.[2]

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Originally published in: Gerhard Steixner, Maria Welzig (eds.), Luxury for All. Milestones in European Stepped Terrace Housing, Birkhäuser, 2020. Translated by Anna Roos, abridged and edited for Building Types Online.