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.

This was not merely an after-effect of Le Corbusier’s infamous polemic that town planners must “kill the street.” It was rooted in contemporary policies — detailed in the 1963 government report, Traffic in Towns — that recommended separating cars and pedestrians. To design guide, engineering blueprint, organisational flowchart, historical thriller and economics reader, Swenarton’s book adds an act of political audacity now largely forgotten but of great importance to me. Through its 1972 Housing Finance Act, Edward Heath’s Tory government aimed to wipe out all council housing by raising council rents to market levels in three stages and removing government funding. Fans like me of modern, Scandinavian-style design, are offered endless visual delights; architects’ sketches and plans, photographs of modern exteriors, and stunning, stylish, frequently minimalist interiors. Today the estates are far from pristine, but their landscaping has matured beautifully and they are extremely popular, both with their council tenants and a steadily growing population of leaseholders and private renters. Where once they were endlessly used as locations for crime dramas, now you are just as likely to find fashion shoots there.The housing projects built in Camden in the 1960s and 1970s when Sydney Cook was borough architect are widely regarded as the most important urban housing built in the UK in the past 100 years. Cook recruited some of the brightest talent available in London at the time and the schemes – which included Alexandra Road, Branch Hill, Fleet Road, Highgate New Town and Maiden Lane – set out a model of housing that continues to command interest and admiration from architects to this day.

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. In hindsight, we can see that the West was undergoing a seismic change from what [Eric] Hobsbawm called the “golden age” of post-war welfare capitalism, marked by plenty and consensus, to the “crisis decades” of the 1970s and ’80s. 11 The extraordinary run of architectural achievement at Camden Council would prove short-lived. 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. 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. Books Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton

Reading Lists

AS an uncertain 60s teenager consulting Sydney Cook, Camden’s borough architect, about studying architecture, I doubted I had the maths.

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 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. The architecture of today that again claims to be a reinterpretation of the terrace tradition, the so-called New London Vernacular, is far more conventional in form, proportion, material, and general decorum . It has been widely discussed in recent years, and represents not just architects’ interest in historic types but also the economics of building materials and developers’ taste for planning risk. See Urban Design London, A New London Housing Vernacular.