In the two decades following the Second World War the predominant form of urban housing produced by British local authorities was what was termed ‘mixed development’, in which flats in high-rise towers or slabs were combined with low-rise blocks comprising stacked rows of duplexes. An amalgamation of new ideas about high-rise living (the ‘tower in the park’) with the longstanding native attachment to ‘a house with a garden’, mixed development became official government policy, promoted by the Housing Manual of 1949 and most famously demonstrated on the ground by the Alton East (Roehampton) estate, designed in 1951 by the architects of the London County Council.
By the early 1960s the deficiencies of this format were becoming all too evident and UK architects sought an alternative. The answer to this quest for ‘low-rise high density’ eventually came in 1967, with Neave Brown’s Fleet Road design for Camden council, which provided the same density as the adjacent mixed development scheme but with building heights that never exceeded 3.5 storeys. Soon followed by Brown’s Alexandra Road and schemes by other Camden architects, including Peter Tábori (Highgate New Town) and Benson & Forsyth (Branch Hill), the Camden projects provided a model of street-based urban housing – and one which is commanding renewed interest from architects faced with the challenge of building housing today.
Mark Swenarton is an architectural historian, critic and educator. He is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool University and was formerly head of the architecture school at Oxford Brookes University. He was founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Construction History in 1985 and the monthly review Architecture Today (1989-2005) and was until recently the editor of Architectural History, the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. His books include Cook’s Camden (2017), Architecture and the Welfare State (2015) and Homes fit for Heroes (1981/2018). His latest book, Housing Atlas: Europe 20th Century, was published in 2023.
