For those of you who missed the recent exhibition in the Tenants Hall here is some information that accompanied it.
"Creating a Piece of City: Neave Brown and the Design of Alexandra Road"
By Professor Mark Swenarton, University of Liverpool
Alexandra Road is the most famous of the projects created by the architects at Camden council during the golden years of the 1960s and 1970s when Sydney Cook was borough architect. Designed by Neave Brown, Alexandra Road immediately attracted architectural attention worldwide for its innovative design. In 1993 its exceptional importance was officially recognized by English Heritage when it was listed grade 2-star one of a small number of postwar housing estates to achieve this status.
But Alexandra Road was not just a housing scheme: it was, in Neave Brown’s words, ‘a piece of city’, comprising shops, workshops, community centre, four acre park, special needs school, children’s reception centre and care home for handicapped adults, as well as more than 500 homes. And while it was designed to meet the normal requirements of local authority housing in terms of costs and space standards, Alexandra Road incorporated a dramatic centrepiece, a 350 metre long curving pedestrian street, Rowley Way, lined on either side by stepped terraces that extend along its full length.
In designing these projects, the Camden architects sought an alternative to the high-rise blocks that most local authorities were building. Brown believed that every home should have its own front door opening directly onto the network of routes and streets that make up a city; and that every home should have its own private external space, open to the sky, in the form of a roof garden or terrace. It was these ideas that he incorporated to such striking effect at Alexandra Road.
Brown designed the scheme immediately after his first scheme for Camden, Fleet Road (now known as the Dunboyne Road estate), and the lineage is clear in the internal organisation of the dwellings: open-plan format with through views and sliding partitions; bedrooms on lower floors with living/kitchen areas above; and a private open-to-the-sky external space for every dwelling, whether house, maisonette or flat.
When Brown presented the Alexandra Road design to the Camden councillors they applauded its ‘ambitious and imaginative quality’. But constructing so complex a project stretched the council’s management abilities to breaking point; and by the time the first tenants moved in, in January 1978, costs had soared. The council, now with Ken Livingstone as chair of housing, commissioned an independent enquiry but the resultant report (1981) proved something of a damp squib, with the council’s project management procedures rather than, as some councillors hoped, the architects taking the blame for the cost overrun.
Alexandra Road is organised around a linear park. To the south is a single three/four storey terrace of houses, block C, that faces the six-storey slabs of the pre-existing London County Council estate. To the north is the curving pedestrian street, Rowley Way (named after Camden’s director of housing). This is lined on one side by a four-storey terrace, block B (comprising two banks of two-storey maisonettes) and on the other by a six-storey slab projecting out over the railway tracks, block A (with three bedroom maisonettes at the bottom, three storeys of flats in the middle and a two-bedroom maisonette on the top). At the eastern end of the pedestrian street, close to the special school, is the social heart of the scheme, with the community centre and shops opening off a multi-tiered public plaza.
After leaving Camden, Neave Brown went on to build a number of projects influenced by Alexandra Road, including most recently the Medina project in the centre of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. He has been a resident of Camden for nearly 50 years and currently lives on the Dunboyne Road estate, the first scheme that he designed for Camden and the precursor of Alexandra Road.