‘THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAMDEN HOUSING’ – Talk at Belsize Community Library by Fabian Watkinson
Committee member Alan Selwyn writes about a talk hosted by Friends of the Belsize Community Library and BelSoc
The talk on 19 June at Belsize Community Library was a treat. Fabian Watkinson, a musician by profession, presented the story of the famous radical housing schemes developed in Camden by a group of very young architects in the 70: a brief ‘golden age’. The talk was from a very personal perspective, as Mr Watkinson himself has lived in one of the houses on the Whittington Estate for around 30 years. The special features of his home had piqued his interest and his research bore fruit in an excellent book with the same title as the talk, published in 2019.
Sydney Cook was the visionary borough architect. Camden was, in the 60s, one of the wealthiest of London’s new boroughs and Cook, who had held the same position in Holborn, collected a team of talented young architects to design individual estates in response to the pressure to build homes. Older properties, often designated as slums, were swept aside to make way for high density schemes based on the requirements for contemporary living. The orthodoxy of the day normally resulted in cheaply system-built high-rise blocks, whereas Cook offered notably high-density low-rise alternatives, fitted to the particulars of the site.
This resulted in some of the innovative developments still with us today. Highly regarded, some are actually listed, such as Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate in NW8 (Grade II*), Branch Hill, Hampstead (Grade II) and, on the BelSoc area border, Dunboyne Road Estate between Parkhill Road and Southampton Road (Grade II). The Russell Nursery estate in Belsize Park was the last of Camden’s own in-house architectural projects, completed in 1993 but already becoming notably less radical.
The buildings were conceived to create comfortable, flexible homes for families, with sliding partitions allowing certain rooms to open up. Bringing maximum light to the living areas often meant turning the houses upside down, with bedrooms below. There were outside private spaces, front doors onto pedestrian walkways and a curated sense of community balanced with privacy. Italian hill-towns were seen as models, with high density, socially cohesive communities growing organically from the topography and these estates in Camden sought to emulate some of their features.
A characteristic of some of the schemes is a stepping back of the upper levels to create terraces and balconies and bring light into the lower levels. The majestic sweep of the Alexandra and Ainsworth estate is cantilevered backwards towards the railway tracks, seen dramatically from the train windows. On the other side is a pedestrian street lined with gardens and terraces and stairs with the stepped back levels of the homes on both sides opening the view to the sky.
The architect of this famous landmark estate was Neave Bown, described in the talk as “one of the greatest housing architects of his age”. He completed another major scheme in Camden, Dunboyne Road and before coming to Camden, an experimental terrace of five houses in Winscombe Street N19, from 1963-6, which became an archetype for the later schemes. Somewhat unusually for an architect, he actually lived in some of his houses!
Cook was insistent these estates were to be homes of the highest quality, equal to any private dwelling. This was controversial and they did prove very expensive, though this was not entirely a fault of his projects. Contracts were not well managed and as building costs soared in the 70s, many contractors went out of business. A disillusioned Neave Bown never worked again in this country but on retirement chose to return to live in a house on his own Dunboyne Road Estate. When asked where he would live if money were no object, he replied “Here!”.
Other notable architects in Cook’s team included Gordon Benson, Alan Forsyth, Peter Tábori, Ken Adie, Bill Forrest and Oscar Palacio. Fabian Watkinson gave a lavishly illustrated tour around some of their creations. Some might look a little brutal from the outside but are almost all remarkably interesting and homely on the inside and well-built. This was indeed a ‘Golden Age’ – a time of idealism and youthful zeal – a determination to build the best environment for local people, something sadly not seen in many recent mass housing developments (see update on 100 Avenue Rd!).
