Description

Architect Patrick Hodgkinson described his design as “about making a new village for central London, rich with the panoply of life of the West End’s villages of old, yet possessing a new, life-giving spirit.”[1] He argued that, in contrast to the radial slab block model presented by Le Corbusier in his Unité d’Habitation, Britain’s linear Georgian terraced housing — exemplified in the Bloomsbury/Holborn area of central London — could support high densities of occupation in conjunction with open spaces, in a form suitable to the temperate climate. However, one aspect of that historical model which he did not favor was the clear social hierarchy it embodied in houses visually ordered into recognizable classes of dwelling. His vision for the Brunswick was infused by a dream of social equality and was intended to provide a mix of housing types where people of all social classes and identities could live alongside each other without distinction. In that sense, it continues to represent a relevant model for mixed-use housing development in central urban areas today.

The Brunswick was recognized as a high-profile architectural monument in 2000, listed Grade II and described in the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport’s listing schedule as “a pioneering example of a megastructure in England: of a scheme which combines several functions of equal importance within a single framework. It is also the pioneering example of low-rise, high-density housing, a field in which Britain was extremely influential on this scale.”[2] But by that point the building was also very dilapidated following two decades of maintenance and changes in the council’s housing allocation policy. It had also suffered greatly from negative press, residents’ discontent, and a series of proposals since 1990 for its radical redevelopment in response to its perceived failures.

Since its completion in 1973 as a council housing development by the London Borough of Camden, above a ground-level shopping precinct in private ownership, the Brunswick has been experienced as a highly problematic living environment by many of its residents and by the council’s housing managers, demanding a high level of maintenance and intervention to ensure the security of its inhabitants from intruders, including drug users and prostitutes.  At the same time, the Brunswick was favored by council tenants compared to neighboring blocks, because of the high standard of accommodation it offered in terms of the size and brightness of the flats. It also provided a large amount of sheltered public open space in its central precinct and first floor level terraces. Hodgkinson conceived these as “pleasure gardens” overlooking a “town room,” with “professional chambers” opening onto the terraces. However, these extensive upper-level spaces were eventually closed off from public use for security reasons, with the removal of the grand staircase drawing people up from the precinct and the installation of security doors to the open access points into the housing blocks from the street.

The shop units in the precinct were, for 30 years until the refurbishment of 2006, under-occupied and offered little in the way of local retail opportunity, but in the last decade redevelopment as “a high street for Bloomsbury” has brought new life to the Brunswick’s central public space. On the project’s completion, some critics suggested that the building could never be expected to work successfully as a social housing estate, due to its innovative architectural design and aesthetic: “Council tenants, unlike the middle-income, middle-class inhabitants initially expected on the site, are unlikely to be respecters of the clean contemporary lines of the exterior.”[3]

As Hodgkinson was at pains to point out, one of its primary features was the fact that it returned 75 percent open space to the site compared to the original 19th-century terraced housing and backyards which stood on the site, along with what was intended to be a mix of housing types for people of different backgrounds, in close proximity to local shopping around a traffic-free square. The definition of the building as a “megastructure” was subsequently to become embedded in the architectural genealogy of the Brunswick as a result of Reyner Banham’s eponymous book featuring the project,[4] but  Hodgkinson hated the description due to its association with the ideas of authoritarian social control. By contrast, he embraced the critic Colin Rowe’s more celebratory comparison of the Brunswick with the Palais Royale (1639) in Paris, and also cited as an antecedent the Adelphi in London, the grand speculative development of houses over vaulted warehouses near the Thames designed by the Adam brothers from 1768.

Indeed, in an architectural and planning climate dominated by the ruthless thinking and practice of Le Corbusier and the European school of functionalist Modernism, Hodgkinson’s rich mix of influences and referents — English Gothic, Arts and Crafts, and the Festival of Britain, from Scandinavian Modernism to Futurism, and from Sartrian existentialism to Lewis Mumford’s “precinctual” approach — was unusual. Hodgkinson’s first ideas for the project were expressed in plans for brick-built, linear buildings organized internally around stair-cases, and externally around sheltered, bounded open spaces — an  image of domestic tranquility as in a grand medieval house, monastery, or the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, quite different from the monumental, even futuristic presence of the A-frame structure that was eventually constructed. He subsequently developed an open-ended, linear configuration of buildings and sheltered spaces on the site, free of traffic, and elevated on a plinth to allow for underground servicing and car parking. It included a centrally placed circular recital hall (replaced by a covered shopping hall in 1963) and 54 shops on each side facing into the precinct, away from the traffic around the perimeter of the building.

The stepped section of the blocks was in place from an early stage, to provide midday sun into all the living rooms, east or west facing, and glass-enclosed “winter-gardens” for every flat. But the design for the monumental A-frame structure (developed with engineer Felix Samuely) which had emerged by 1965, with open terraces opening from the internal atrium level to overlook the shopping precinct below, was only a by-product of changes in building legislation that meant the structure had to be engineered and executed in reinforced concrete instead of brick. Hodgkinson objected to Banham’s subsequent description of the Brunswick as a tribute to Sant’Elia, “the virtual inventor of the A-frame Terrassenhäuser section”[5] pointing to the less well-known Elberfeld hospital project of 1928 by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, and Henri Sauvage’s Rue Vavin apartment block in Paris of 1911–1912 as more significant influences. He emphasized his intention not to produce an oppressive, overbearing concrete megastructure detached from its urban surroundings, but to express an existential dimension to everyday life, allowing residents to look up towards the sky, above and away from the depressingly mundane street-level environment of post-war London.

Nevertheless, the scheme has also become notorious as a Brutalist building through its lifetime, its exposed concrete facades interpreted as representing the very opposite of green city values. Residents of the Brunswick have been clear during its lifetime that the material conditions of their lives have not been satisfactory, participating in a discourse of complaint focused on the local council and its failure to address the material inadequacies of the construction, manifested in leaks, stains, corrosion, and strange smells which have permeated the housing blocks over many years. But Hodgkinson later explained, “I myself reject Brutalism […] because I felt it was inhuman and just a fashionable gimmick,”[6] insisting that he had never intended the materiality of the building as it was realized to be understood as an ideological statement. He embraced the opportunities offered by the refurbishment in 2006 to address some of the building’s maintenance problems and cover its exposed facades as he had originally envisaged with a cream-colored finish evoking John Nash’s grand stucco terraces at Regent’s Park.

When the redevelopment of the Brunswick Centre site in Holborn, central London, was first mooted in 1958, the proposals aroused a public outcry, and there was considerable dismay among locals at the prospect of what was described as a deeply-rooted population being displaced. But the decision to proceed was based on the principle of radical redevelopment in bomb-blasted London, established by  Abercrombie and Forshaw’s Statutory Development Plan of 1951, and housing on the site which had been condemned as substandard was demolished under subsequent legislation launching a major slum clearance program. By 1963, the Ministry of Transport had set out further recommendations to create traffic-free “environmental areas” in cities, surrounded by new highways for fast-moving traffic,[7] which built on clearance policies, and directly informed the design evolution of the Brunswick scheme as a “precinctual” approach to housing development.

Patrick Hodgkinson’s mixed-use proposal needs to be understood as a radical counter-proposal to the original planning applications made for the site between 1958 and 1960 by developer Marchmont Properties and architects Covell and Matthews. Their scheme com-prising a 40-story office block, three 20-story blocks of flats, and some long five-story blocks containing shops and hostel accommodation for the University of London was rejected by the London County Council, which was concerned about preserving the residential character of the neighborhood. In 1959, Marchmont was advised to appoint Leslie Martin, who had recently left his position as chief architect at the LCC (where he had been responsible for the design of the high-rise Alton Estate in Roehampton, southwest London), because he could exert political leverage, and was also  familiar with the Bloomsbury context. Hodgkinson was working in Martin’s office on a number of low-rise, high-density housing schemes, including an alternative project for the LCC’s Loughborough Estate in Brixton, and was opposed both to the slum clearance policies  established by the County of London plan, and the Corbusian model of housing development embraced by the LCC.

Hodgkinson’s vision for the Brunswick was of a coherent architectural framework which could bring public and private lifeworlds together through a network of spaces at different scales, connecting private dwellings to the street and the city across a series of thresholds. It would allow different households and communities to live alongside each other in relative privacy compared to the tight-knit traditional neighborhood street, and in many ways it establishes a model for inner-city redevelopment which does just that, notwithstanding the alterations to the architectural concept that have been realized over time to delineate and secure those boundaries more closely.

In 1992, the Architects’ Journal commented that the way in which residents had “personalized” their external balconies had led to the Brunswick developing a rather exotic feel, comparable with Louis Kahn’s idea of “inhabited ruins.”[8] Invisible, however, to the public eye have been the similar personalization of the common spaces inside the housing blocks — the atrium and access galleries at each level —  and the transformation of individual flats that has occurred during the building’s lifetime, reflecting the changing social mix and lifestyles  of the residential community over three generations. A significant proportion of the 600-odd flats have gradually escaped into the private market and changed hands as a result of the “‘right-to-buy” government policy initiative (for council tenants to buy their homes at a discount) introduced in the 1980s, while those that have remained in council ownership (including those units designated “sheltered” hous-ing, with access to a warden service) have become a resource accessibly only to the most vulnerable and those declared homeless when tenancies become available. But, while the successful regeneration of the shopping precinct has created a new stage for public interaction and of course retail opportunity in this high-value area of central London, the experience of life inside the Brunswick has not really entered the public domain as the subject of discourse in its own right. As a place, perceived from within as a container of disparate people linked (or not) in space by many different threads, rather than observed from without as an external profile or aesthetic, monumental form, the Brunswick represents a multi-layered, multi-vocal social setting with its own internal dynamic. Now recognized as a landmark of national post-war cultural heritage, it has also during its lifetime offered residents a unique and generous spatial setting in which to sustain a private domestic life in close proximity to the opportunities offered by the central city as a theater of social exchange.

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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.