Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing 2018

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The book is the first to provide a comprehensive study of the work of recent RIBA Royal Gold Medal winner Neave Brown, as well as schemes by Benson & Forsyth, Peter Tábori, Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. Launched in 1964, the Borough of Camden’s first council established an architects department of 98, including 43 architects or assistants. Swenarton, with a wealth of sources and references, credits many remarkable team members, especially Neave Brown, winner of this year’s Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, best known for the Alexandra Road Scheme. He joined the team in 1965 only after assurances that Camden’s architects were given scope to pursue their own designs. 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.

The Cook’s Camden exhibition focuses on six schemes designed by the RIBA Royal Gold Medallist 2018, Neave Brown, including Alexandra Road (pictured), as well by fellow Camden architects Peter Tábori and Benson Forsyth. Mark Swenarton, Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, former Head of School at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture and author of the recent book 'Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing' will talk about how Sydney Cook, Neave Brown and the Camden team created this new kind of housing, what it comprised, and how we can learn from them today.

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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.” He had no need to count walls in a square or even polygonal room because Sydney Cook ensured that every Camden wall counted.

Cook’s Camden, a richly illustrated history of the famous London Borough of Camden architects department of the 1970s, under Sydney Cook." —Owen Hatherley, Architectural Review Younger readers will not remember an era, swept away by Thatcher and Blair, when councils had municipal architects and departments, designed, often built and maintained their own housing, setting standards against which all housing was judged. Some of the most innovative housing designs came from local councils and the new housing was a source of urban pride.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.

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. 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. The extraordinary run of architectural achievement at Camden Council would ultimately prove short-lived. By the mid 1970s, Swenarton writes, “the large-scale redevelopment activities of local authorities came to be seen not as the friend but the foe of public good.” 10 The growing disaffection was an outgrowth of the wider economic crisis that marked the decade. The election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 would further accelerate the dissolution of the social democratic state and the rise of neoliberalism. Interview, Arch Dailyhttps://www.archdaily.com/886940/neave-brown-riba-gold-medalist-winner-sadly-passes-away-aged-88

“A modern urbanism”

Three years later, then an MP, Millie voted with Harold Wilson’s government to rescind the Act and in 1977, months before her death, helped push through this country’s last progressive Housing Act. Sydney Cook started 38 housing projects at Camden; the last of his major estates was perhaps the most difficult. Maiden Lane was also designed by Benson and Forsyth, but in 1973, in the midst of the work, Cook retired due to ill health — a blow to the exceptional team he had nurtured and controlled for almost a decade. The scheme was similar in concept to other Camden projects, with strips of housing and various amenities including a nursery, squash courts, shops, and community centers. If built according to plan, Maiden Lane would have been the largest of Cook’s projects; what was eventually realized was a much reduced and altered version of the design. 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. In recent years, the feverish idea that social problems were produced by the alienating effects of modernist design has mostly passed. The state is no longer interested in sponsoring housing, but it has, in certain cases, begun to protect it as heritage. Some of Cook’s Camden has been listed by Historic England: Alexandra Road, in 1993, the youngest building ever protected at that point, and Branch Hill and Fleet Road, in 2010. When Neave Brown’s Winscombe Street houses were listed in 2013, he became the only living architect to have all his British buildings protected — under the circumstances, a bittersweet honor. 16 The state is no longer interested in sponsoring housing, but it has begun to protect it as heritage.

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 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 Under Cook’s leadership, low-rise, high-density housing would become the governing ethos for the architects of Camden Council. And indeed, Brown had already designed and built a small residential development in the borough that would become a template upon which to expand. A terrace of five houses on Winscombe Street for himself and several friends, all artists or professionals with families, the project represented a comprehensive re-interpretation of the terrace housing type that had dominated London development in the 19th century. Appendix 1 'Sydney Cook as I knew him' recollections by Neave Brown, Frank Dobson, John Green, Martin Morton and Peter Tábori 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 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. 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 Throughout the ’80s, the new political mood — the political rejection of the aspirations of the welfare state — would provoke further critique. Influential books including Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space and Alice Coleman’s Utopia on Trial made explicit arguments about the contribution of modernist environments to urban crime and social breakdown. Towards the end of the decade, the council commissioned an investigation of Maiden Lane. The final report detailed a litany of complaints about the estate — spotty maintenance, vandalism, crime — and then widened into an ideological critique of the modernist architecture itself. Notoriously, the report recommended that the houses should be completely transformed, with the interiors reconfigured into conventional arrangements, and pitched roofs applied to the exteriors. The guiding idea was apparently the belief that if the estate were re-made into a more “traditional” environment with traditional aesthetics, then its problems would somehow be remedied. 15 Camden New Journal—http://camdennewjournal.com/article/lets-celebrate-architects-when-tenants-needs-are-met