It was late, over-budget and ended his career. But 40 years on, Neave Brown has just won British architecture’s top award for the Alexandra Road estate and similar masterpieces of social housing

‘I have a lovely view from here,” says Neave Brown, “because of a little detail that you would never notice.” The 88-year-old architect is sitting in his living room in the Fleet Road estate in north London, which he designed in the 1960s, looking out at something like a concrete version of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Rows of homes lead on to layered terraces that spill over with lush planting, forming a hidden multi-levelled oasis in the middle of Gospel Oak.

“I can see the wooden screen that divides my terrace from my neighbours’, but it doesn’t spoil my view because it has slots in between,” he says. “But when I step out on to the terrace, I can’t see through it, because of the alignment of the planks, so it becomes a private space. That’s the kind of thinking architects do.”

It is the kind of subtle thinking about the details of everyday living that was at the core of Brown’s ground-breaking designs for high-density, low-rise social housing in Camden in the 1960s and 70s, for which he has just been awarded the RIBA royal gold medal, the UK’s highest honour for architecture – 40 years after his last project in the country was completed.

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“It is an absolutely dumbfounding surprise,” he says, eyes wide with shock. “I’m in a state of tiswas about it. I stopped following architecture years ago, so I had no idea there was this renewed interest in my work until recently. I thought my buildings were a curiosity of the past that people had largely forgotten about.”

Brown is now celebrated for his inventive housing schemes and enjoys the accolade of being the only living architect to have all of his work in the UK listed. But recognition has been a long time coming. For much of his professional life he was damned, unable to shake the stigma surrounding his final project in the UK.

Stretching for 300 metres along a railway line near Swiss Cottage, the Alexandra Road estate is another concrete megastructure overgrown with lush terraced planting, with the air of a ziggurat. It is “the most architecturally celebrated housing scheme built in Britain in the last half-century”, writes Mark Swenarton, in a handsome new book on the pioneering projects built in Camden in the period, under borough architect Sydney Cook. Now grade II*-listed, the estate was over budget, beyond schedule and subject to an interminable public inquiry that finished Brown’s career – even though the findings of the inquiry finally exonerated the architect.

“It was an absolute nightmare,” he recalls. “I couldn’t work in England ever again. And when Margaret Thatcher came to power, she swiftly destroyed everything we had worked for anyway, by scrapping social housing altogether.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Concrete vision … Brown’s Winscombe Street terrace of houses in Camden. Photograph: Martin Charles

A place of pilgrimage for architecture students and film location scouts alike, Alexandra Road is still a startling sight. Its raked stacks of studios and maisonettes form a marching crescent of concrete fins either side of a curving pedestrian street paved with red bricks, with cars swept down below. It feels like walking down the middle of a rocky canyon, exotic plants sprouting from every cleft, little staircases leading you up to front doors and raised walkways. Speak to the residents of the 500-flat behemoth – which also includes a school, pub, youth club and community centre – and you get an idea of the affection with which the place is held.

“It makes me smile every day,” says Sara Bell, who has lived here since 1985. “I’ve always loved it. My kids could play out on the car-free street when they were growing up, and it’s such a sociable place to live. We formed a co-operative and redid the park, and we even make our own honey.”

She grew up around the corner and remembers visiting the gleaming white structure with a friend when it was first built. “It was so futuristic, we were absolutely bowled over. We’d never seen anything like it.”

The sheen didn’t last for long. Like many estates of the period, Alexandra Road fell into disrepair. Maintenance regimes were abandoned by the council and the great hulk was left to crumble, becoming a den of antisocial behaviour.

“There was a time when you got a raised eyebrow or a look of sympathy if you said you lived here,” says Elizabeth Knowles, who has been on the estate since it was first built. “At one point no one would deliver to our flats, and if you were a pizza delivery boy you were likely to be relieved of your pizza before it reached its destination.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Upside down thinking … a middle-floor kitchen on Winscombe Street. Photo © Martin Charles/RIBA Collections

There is still the odd run-down, smashed-up apartment, but the place is looking in reasonable condition these days. This is largely due to the energy of the residents, who signed a collective letter in support of Brown’s nomination for the medal – the greatest testimonial an architect could wish for.

Taking on renewed relevance in light of the Grenfell Tower fire, Brown’s work shows how high densities can still be achieved in low-rise form, his projects drawing on London’s fabric of streets and squares.

Instead of violating the environment with towers and slab blocks, we wanted to do housing that made a piece of city Neave Brown

“We were trying to come up with a proper English modernism,” says Brown, who, after a formative period at high school in the United States, went to study at the Architectural Association in London. There he met a like-minded group who went on to become some of the pioneering social housing architects of their day. “Instead of violating the environment with towers and slab blocks surrounded by undefined space, we wanted to do housing that acknowledged our traditions and made a piece of city.”

He first tested his ideas in 1963, when he built a row of five “upside-down” houses for himself and a group of friends on Winscombe Street in Camden’s Dartmouth Park. Children’s bedrooms were placed on the ground floor, with big barn doors opening on to a communal garden; the parents’ bedroom and living room were at the top, while the family zone was in the middle, the whole connected by spiral stairs.

“It was built as a community, an extended family,” he says. “When you heard children’s laughter downstairs, you were never quite sure if they were your kids or someone else’s.”

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The homes had to be built to the space standards and budget of the local authority in order to secure funding, so they were directly comparable to council housing. Yet, because of the cleverly arranged plan, they had a sense of space and openness that made them feel markedly more generous. They caught the eye of Sydney Cook, who hired Brown to scale up his ideas for the borough, in the form of 70 homes at Fleet Road and, later, Alexandra Road.

“I didn’t know it then, but it was the prototype for what would come next,” he says. “It sounds pretentious, but the three schemes can be read as a thesis, from the house to the city. They all share the same details, from the arrangement of public and semi-public spaces, to the terraces and sliding doors. In each case, I didn’t think I was designing social housing, but just housing. Good London housing.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I didn’t think I was designing social housing, just good London housing’ … Neave Brown. Photograph by Garath Gardner.

It is the kind of approach that sorely needs to be revived. There are signs that the recent reappraisal of Brown’s work is filtering through into a new wave of council-led housing projects. Peter Barber’s small practice, for example, is working on a dazzling range of low-rise, high-density housing schemes for a number of local authorities, reviving back-to-backs, courtyard homes and multi-levelled terraced housing, cleverly “notched” with patios.

Brown is humbled that his buildings are being looked at afresh, but he fizzes with anger at the current state of UK housing. “Neoliberalism has stripped out the social ideology from our country and led to a ruinous economy with ruinous housing,” he says fiercely. “I’m an old, old man, so my answer is probably not the right one, but I think we need a new national agency to govern standards and fund the construction of housing for properly mixed communities – crucially with maintenance costs financed for the whole life of the building.”

As someone who has lived through more than 20 governments and the effects of their successive housing policies, his advice is well worth heeding.

• Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton is published by Lund Humphries.