Alexandra Road Estate

Last updated

Alexandra Road Estate
Alexandra Road Estate.jpg
View from Rowley Way
Alexandra Road Estate
General information
Location London Borough of Camden
Coordinates 51°32′20″N0°10′59″W / 51.539°N 0.183°W / 51.539; -0.183
No. of units520
Construction
Constructed1972–1978
Architect Neave Brown
Style Brutalism
Listing
Listed Building – Grade II*
Designated18 August 1993
Reference no. 1130403

The Alexandra Road estate (officially the Alexandra and Ainsworth estate, but often referred to as Rowley Way, the name of its main thoroughfare) is a housing estate in the London Borough of Camden, North West London, England. It was designed in a brutalist style in 1968 by Neave Brown of Camden Council's Architects Department. Construction work commenced in 1972 and was completed in 1978. It is constructed from site-cast, board-marked white, unpainted reinforced concrete. Along with 520 apartments, the site also includes a school, community centre, youth club, heating complex, and parkland.

Contents

Estate

The estate consists of three parallel east–west blocks, and occupies a crescent-shaped site bounded on the south by Boundary Road, Loudoun Road on the east, Abbey Road on the west, and by the West Coast Main Line to the north. The desire to control the sound and vibration from passing trains was a major consideration in the layout of the estate. [1] Two rows of terraced apartments are aligned along the tracks. The higher, eight-story block directly adjacent to the railway line is organised in the form of a ziggurat, and acts as a noise barrier that blocks the noise of the trains from reaching the interior portion of the site, and its foundations rest on rubber pads that eliminate vibration. [2] A lower, four-storey block runs along the other side of a continuous pedestrian walkway, known as Rowley Way, serving both terraced rows of buildings. The third row of buildings, along the southern edge of the site, parallels another public walkway, Langtry Walk, between this row and the existing earlier buildings of the Ainsworth Estate and defines a public park with play areas between the second and third row of dwellings.

The lower four-storey building along Rowley Way contains maisonettes with shared access, terraces, and gardens overlooking the park at the rear. Maisonettes also occupy the top two levels of the larger eight-storey building opposite, with entrance from a walkway on the 7th floor that runs the entire length of the structure. Dwellings in the lower floor in this block are entered from open stairs serving two dwellings per floor. The flat roofs of the stepped elevation provides private outdoor areas for every home. Garage parking is located beneath the building, and underneath the building at the rear alongside the railway tracks.

Development and history

Since the early 1950s, tower blocks surrounded by public open space had been the method of choice for councils to replace terraced housing in poor condition while keeping the same high population density. However, by the mid-1960s, even before the collapse of Ronan Point, the shortcomings of that method were becoming apparent. Neave Brown believed that ziggurat style terraces, little higher than the terraces they replaced, could provide a better solution. Vehicular traffic could be restricted to basement level. Family-sized flats, bright and airy due to the set-back upper floors, could open, via their own "defensible" front garden, onto ground floor streets/play areas, whilst the higher levels could be used for smaller flats, each with a private balcony. [3]

The Alexandra Road Estate may be seen as Brown's culminating, and largest scale, effort to apply these principles to the design of high-density public housing. Five houses on Winscombe Street, built in 1967, were his first experiment with the terrace type. The Fleet Road project, begun about the same time and consisting of 71 houses, a shop, and a studio, arranged in parallel terraced rows, was a further application of the idea.

Public Inquiry

The estate received much criticism during and after its construction because of its very high cost (particularly compared with tower blocks), caused by the complicated nature of its construction, unforeseen foundation problems, and the delays caused by those at a time of very high inflation, reaching 20% per year at one point in the 1970s. In 1978 a Public Inquiry was launched by the Labour-run council to investigate the reasons for overshooting the budget and timetable.

Although there were indeed a significant delay and an increase in cost of approximately four times the originally commissioned tender, the Inquiry may have been politically motivated. [4] Mark Swenarton cites several factors for its launch: The campaigning Conservatives tried to allege that Labour was incompetent in managing the council and an increasingly pressured Labour hoping to relieve itself from the public anger of the spending by raising the transparency and potentially find the roots of the problem with the Conservative leadership 1968–1971. [5]

The outcome of the Inquiry published in seven reports mainly made "the apparent failure of the councillors to understand the contractual obligations that they had undertaken" [6] responsible for the mismanagement and was not successful in blaming the architect as had been hoped by some. Despite there being no findings of a mismanagement on his part, however, being the subject of a Public Inquiry destroyed Neave Brown's reputation in the UK where he never built again. [7] [8]

Alexandra Road Estate today

The estate has suffered less vandalism than many Camden estates, and it was granted Grade II* listed status on 18 August 1993, the first post-war council housing estate to be listed. [9] It was described by Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, as "one of the most distinguished groups of buildings in England since the Second World War."[ citation needed ]

After a continuing career including international town planning and post-graduate teaching, Brown retrained as a fine artist, to which occupation he devoted his retirement. [3] [10] In October 2017, Brown won the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. [11] [12] Brown died, aged 88, in January 2018.

Other sites

The Highgate New Town/Whittington Estate by Peter Tábori has a similar design.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbican Estate</span> Residential complex in London, England

The Barbican Estate, or Barbican, is a residential complex of around 2,000 flats, maisonettes, and houses in central London, England, within the City of London. It is in an area once devastated by World War II bombings and densely populated by financial institutions, 1.4 miles (2.2 km) north east of Charing Cross. Originally built as rental housing for middle and upper-middle-class professionals, it remains an upmarket residential estate. It contains, or is adjacent to, the Barbican Arts Centre, the Museum of London, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Barbican public library, the City of London School for Girls and a YMCA, forming the Barbican Complex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Park Hill, Sheffield</span> Housing estate in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England

Park Hill is a housing estate in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. It was built between 1957 and 1961, and in 1998 was given Grade II* listed building status. Following a period of decline, the estate is being renovated by developers Urban Splash into a mostly private mixed-tenure estate made up of homes for market rent, private sale, shared ownership, and student housing while around a quarter of the units in the development will be social housing. The renovation was one of the six short-listed projects for the 2013 RIBA Stirling Prize. The Estate falls within the Manor Castle ward of the City. Park Hill is also the name of the area in which the flats are sited. The name relates to the deer park attached to Sheffield Manor, the remnant of which is now known as Norfolk Park.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terraced house</span> Form of medium-density housing

A terrace, terraced house (UK), or townhouse (US) is a kind of medium-density housing that first started in 16th century Europe with a row of joined houses sharing side walls. In the United States and Canada these are sometimes known as row houses or row homes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brunswick Centre</span> Residential and shopping centre in London

The Brunswick Centre is a grade II listed residential and shopping centre in Bloomsbury, London, England. It is located between Brunswick Square and Russell Square and is administratively in the London Borough of Camden.

Cranhill is an inner city district and housing scheme in the north east of Glasgow, Scotland. Cranhill was developed from public funding in the early 1950s and was originally, chiefly composed of four-storey tenement blocks surrounding a patch of grassland, which became Cranhill Park. Later development saw the building of three tower blocks, surrounded by rows of terraced maisonettes. In more recent years, a number of semi-detached and detached homes have been built. The area also hosts some shops, two primary schools and nurseries, a community centre and the Cranhill water tower.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Hood Gardens</span> Residential estate in Poplar, London

Robin Hood Gardens is a residential estate in Poplar, London, designed in the late 1960s by architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972. It was built as a council housing estate with homes spread across 'streets in the sky': social housing characterised by broad aerial walkways in long concrete blocks, much like the Park Hill estate in Sheffield; it was informed by, and a reaction against, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation. The estate was built by the Greater London Council, but subsequently the London Borough of Tower Hamlets became the landlord.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wimpey no-fines house</span> Construction method and designs

The Wimpey No-fines House was a construction method and series of house designs produced by the George Wimpey company and intended for mass-production of social housing for families, developed under the Ministry of Works post-World War II Emergency Factory Made programme. "No-fines" refers to the type of concrete used – concrete with no fine aggregates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multifamily residential</span> Type of housing development that emphasizes density and proximity of many neighbors

Multifamily residential is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex. Units can be next to each other, or stacked on top of each other. Common forms include apartment building and condominium, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single building owner. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Churchill Gardens</span> Housing estate in Pimlico, London

Churchill Gardens is a large housing estate in the Pimlico area of Westminster, London. The estate was developed between 1946 and 1962 to a design by the architects Powell and Moya, replacing Victorian terraced houses extensively damaged during the Blitz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alton Estate</span> Housing estate in Roehampton, London

The Alton Estate is a large council estate situated in Roehampton, southwest London. One of the largest council estates in the UK, it occupies an extensive area of land west of Roehampton village and runs between the Roehampton Lane through-road and Richmond Park Golf Courses.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the construction of numerous brutalist apartment blocks in Sheffield, England. The Sheffield City Council had been clearing inner-city residential slums since the early 1900s. Prior to the 1950s these slums were replaced with low-rise council housing, mostly constructed in new estates on the edge of the city. By the mid-1950s the establishment of a green belt had led to a shortage of available land on the edges of the city, whilst the government increased subsidies for the construction of high-rise apartment towers on former slum land, so the council began to construct high-rise inner city estates, adopting modernist designs and industrialised construction techniques, culminating in the construction of the award-winning Gleadless Valley and Park Hill estates.

Netherthorpe is a suburb of the City of Sheffield in England. It is one mile (1.6 km) west of the city centre. It is mostly an area of local government built housing situated on a considerable slope running downhill from the Brook Hill roundabout, at a height of 350 feet (107m), towards the Shalesmoor roundabout at a height of 160 feet (50m) over a distance of half a mile (1 km). It is bounded by the suburbs of Upperthorpe to the north, Crookesmoor to the west and the dualled Inner Ring Road to the east. The suburb falls within the Walkley ward of the City.

Neave Brown was an American-born British architect and artist. He specialized in modernist housing. Brown is the only architect to have had all his UK work listed: A row of houses in Winscombe Street, the Dunboyne Road Estate and Alexandra Road Estate, all located in Camden.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public housing in the United Kingdom</span> British government and local authority housing programmes

Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lancaster West Estate</span> Housing estate in North Kensington, London

Lancaster Road (West) Estate is a housing estate in North Kensington, west London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dunboyne Road Estate</span> Housing estate in Gospel Oak, London

The Dunboyne Road Estate previously known as the Fleet Road Estate is a Grade II-listed modernist estate, designed in Gospel Oak, London by Neave Brown in the late 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winscombe Street</span> Terrace of houses in London, England

Winscombe Street refers to a terrace of five houses in Camden, London, England, designed by the architect Neave Brown for himself and a collective of four other families. It is Grade II listed and was the precursor for the house and maisonette designs used in Dunboyne Road Estate and Alexandra Road Estate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michiel Brinkman</span> Dutch architect (1873 - 1925)

Michiel Brinkman (1873–1925) was a Dutch architect and the father of Johannes Brinkman the exponent of Nieuwe Bouwen, modern architecture in the Netherlands. Michiel Brinkman is notable for his Justus van Effen housing block complex in Spangen, which is a Rijksmonument, built in 1922. it incorporates 3m wide connecting terraces on the third floor, known in Dutch as Bovenstraten, and in English as 'Streets in the sky'.

Peter Tábori was a Hungarian-born British architect. He trained in London and is best known for the housing schemes he designed for the London Borough of Camden under Sydney Cook in the 1960s and 1970s, especially Highgate New Town (1968–1979).

The Hunslet Grange Flats was a complex of deck-accessed flats in Hunslet, Leeds.

References

  1. Great Buildings Online.
  2. Wu Wei's Housing terraces in the UK (Part II)
  3. 1 2 "Neave Brown". Directory of Architects & Designers. The Modern House. Retrieved 3 March 2014.
  4. Swenarton, Mark (2017). Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London, United Kingdom: Lund Humphries. p. 268. ISBN   978-1-84822-204-5.
  5. Swenarton, Mark (2017). Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London, United Kingdom: Lund Humphries. p. 268ff. ISBN   978-1-84822-204-5.
  6. Swenarton, Mark (2017). Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London, United Kingdom: Lund Humphries. p. 275. ISBN   978-1-84822-204-5.
  7. Swenarton, Mark (12 January 2018). "Neave Brown Obituary". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  8. Swenarton, Mark (2017). Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London, United Kingdom: Lund Humphries. pp. 265, 274–275. ISBN   978-1-84822-204-5.
  9. English Heritage Images of England.
  10. "Neave Brown in conversation with Mark Swenarton". pre-empts the release of AA Files 67. Architectural Association School of Architecture. 3 December 2013. Archived from the original on 3 March 2014. Retrieved 3 March 2014.
  11. Oliver Wainwright, "'I'm dumbfounded!' … Neave Brown on bagging an award for the building that killed his career". The Guardian , 6 October 2017. Accessed 6 October 2017
  12. "Neave Brown wins Royal Gold Medal for architecture" . Retrieved 6 October 2017.

Further reading

Swenarton, Mark (3 March 2014). "Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978–1981". Planning Perspectives. 29 (4): 423–446. doi:10.1080/02665433.2013.864956. S2CID   143458581.