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The great estate

Two north London housing estates have been given a grade II listing by English Heritage. Is this rightful recognition of cultural and architectural legacy, or a hindrance to renovation and improvement? Words and photography by Simon Brandon

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Neave Brown, a resident on the Dunboyne Road estate in Camden, north London, is particularly well qualified to comment on the building in which he lives - he designed it.

Dunboyne Road was designed in 1966, completed in 1977 and is one of two housing estates in Camden - the other is the Branch Hill estate, near Hampstead - to be awarded grade II listed status this year by English Heritage.

In other words, these buildings are now officially protected as part of our cultural and architectural legacy. The term ‘housing estate’ still has negative connotations, and the decision to list these buildings is a reminder that not every social housing scheme built in the 1960s and 1970s was a monolithic and characterless tower block. But English Heritage’s decisions haven’t gone down well with all the estates’ residents.

Camden has yet to begin decent homes work on either site, and their new status as listed buildings could delay the programme even further.

‘The consequence of listing may be to delay the programme while listed building consent is obtained for the works,’ says a spokesperson for the council. ‘This can potentially take some months but we are already working with English Heritage on the way forward in terms of scope and design of the scheme.’

Expenditure on external works at Dunboyne Road is likely to cost the council at least £1.2 million. Any internal improvements will be subject to discussions with residents and the conservation organisation.

Added clout

For Dunboyne Road’s architect, however, the new listing is positive, delays or not.

‘The council has to do things correctly now, which is very different to how they have done things in the past,’ Mr Brown says. ‘Listing has added clout to our ability to ensure work is done correctly. It means the building will be looked after.’

His neighbour and fellow leaseholder, Takeshi Hayatsu - a former chair of the Dunboyne Road Tenants’ and Residents’ Association - also hopes the listing will force the council to improve the way it maintains the estate, although he acknowledges that many tenants’ priorities do not align with those of English Heritage.

‘A lot of tenants are frustrated. Decent homes [work] has been delayed because of the listing,’ Mr Hayatsu points out. ‘The council said they had to wait until the listing decision was made, and that is quite bad news for us. Years of neglect have led to serious deterioration.’

That deterioration is hard to spot from the outside. Dunboyne Road is a beautiful housing estate. Flowers and greenery spill from its many terraced gardens; the houses face each other across large, landscaped communal areas; parking and garages are a level below. Inside, the houses are light and spacious, each with its own front door.

Mr Brown’s architectural approach, he explains, was to marry fashionable modernist ideas with aspects of more traditional housing - chiefly the sense of community fostered by Victorian terraces. The estate’s design surpassed density targets at the time. As English Heritage notes in its decision, Dunboyne Road was an attempt to address the desperate need for high-density social housing without resorting to tower blocks, a building style which created, according to Mr Brown, ‘monstrous ghettos’.

At the time, he worked for Camden’s in-house architectural team. It was, he says, ‘very unusual’ for a council to give so much responsibility to a single architect. Twice as many designers worked on Branch Hill, the second Camden estate to be listed this year. Its architects were Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, both protégés of Mr Brown at the council.

Housing estate, Camden

The Camden style

Today the Branch Hill estate is completely obscured by scaffold boards and struts as the council’s contractors repair its roofs as part of a £2 million programme of external works.

The estate was built on the front lawn of a Hampstead mansion which was bought by the council and turned into a care home. The lawn slopes down to thick woods, and the estate’s 27 low-rise properties, each with its own roof garden, follow the gradient. When looking down from the top of the hill, the terraced roofs give the impression of an unbroken garden cascading gently down the slope towards the trees - a vista that will reappear when work finishes in November.

Housing estate, Camden

Branch Hill closely resembles Dunboyne Road in many ways - both feature clean white lines, narrow windows with dark wooden casements, large front windows and overhanging foliage. In fact, Mr Brown and his associates’ work for the council has come to be known as the Camden style.
Unfortunately Branch Hill’s residents have something else in common with their Dunboyne Road counterparts: concern about the delay to decent homes work. ‘The requirement for internal works will be subject to a detailed survey and consideration of how we can meet the requirements of English Heritage,’ says a spokesperson for Camden Council.

Jean Cramond moved into Branch Hill as a Camden tenant 30 years ago, four years after the buildings were completed. She isn’t aware that her home has been listed, but she is aware that decent homes work has still not begun on her estate. ‘They’re [the council] only worried about the outside, not the inside,’ she says. ‘If it looks bad outside, they’ll fix it.’

A waiting game

Ms Cramond and her neighbours might have to wait a little longer for their interior improvements now the estates have been listed. For those who care about what these estates represent, however, the delay is a price worth paying.

Would Mr Brown design Dunboyne Road the same way again? ‘I would indeed,’ he says. ‘But it would be impossible to build now. It’s very difficult to maximise the opportunities a site gives you with the current building standards.’

While such standards, such as the code for sustainable homes and lifetime homes, have doubtless improved the overall quality of new housing, they have also, he argues, homogenised it. Developments such as Dunboyne Road and Branch Hill are now officially celebrated for their functionality as social housing as well as for their aesthetic qualities, but such idiosyncrasy is growing rarer.

And so the next question must be: which recent new-build developments will be recognised as part of our architectural heritage 30 years from now?

The A-list

Among the reasons given by English Heritage for listing the Branch Hill estate were the ‘special architectural interest of this bold, modernist design of 1970 by Benson and Forsyth… [and its] complex stepped-section, which works brilliantly on a sloping site.’ It is, the document concludes, ‘one of the best estates designed by Camden Architects’ Department, pioneers of low-rise, high-density housing in the 1960s and 1970s.’

Dunboyne Road was also singled out for its ‘special architectural interest.’ EH’s report adds: ‘Architects in the 1960s were exploring the idea of the street as centre of community life. For…Neave Brown especially, it was less the street and more the idea of terraced housing that was the essential ingredient for fostering community spirit… When the plans were first drawn up in 1966, they were avant-garde in Britain.’

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