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The architect who refused to follow the tower block trend

Receiving the UK’s highest accolade for architecture may have left Neave Brown “dumbfounded”, but he tells Kate Youde that without changes to housing policy, society could fall apart.  Photography by Peter Searle

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The architect who refused to follow the tower block trend #ukhousing

His visionary designs for social housing recently earned Neave Brown the UK’s highest honour for architecture.

Inside Housing meets the 88-year-old architect, who has terminal lung cancer, at the Dunboyne Road Estate near Gospel Oak in north London. It is one of the schemes he designed when he was an architect at Camden Council and it has been home for him and his wife for the past 10 years.

The reason for our visit is hanging on the arm of Mr Brown’s chair, ready for his grandchildren to play with: the blue-ribboned Royal Gold Medal, given in recognition of a lifetime’s work.

Recipients of the annual award include Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid – and now a “dumbfounded” Mr Brown, who also has the honour of being the only living architect to have all his UK work listed.


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This includes his 1965 row of five terraced houses (built with the living space upstairs so as to maximise the amount of light) on Winscombe Street, Dartmouth Park, north London, which was a private co-housing project for Mr Brown and his friends but financed by Camden Council.

The Dunboyne Road Estate in which we are sitting – previously known as the Fleet Road Estate and completed in 1975 – was the UK’s first high-density low-rise scheme. Its parallel rows of low-rise blocks include 71 maisonettes and flats with their own terraces.

Mr Brown refused to design the tower blocks popular among some of his contemporaries because he believed it the “wrong thing to do”.

Both were precursors to his most well-known scheme – Camden Council’s Alexandra Road Estate near Swiss Cottage, which Mr Brown describes as “a piece of city”.

As well as 520 homes in stepped terraces, the 1970s estate includes shops, a public park, a school, a community centre and a children’s centre.

The highest block is eight storeys; Mr Brown refused to design the tower blocks popular among some of his contemporaries because he believed it the “wrong thing to do”. The same details such as windows, balconies and ideas of space run throughout his three schemes. “It is a single piece of design extended to three different levels of scale,” he explains.

When announcing Mr Brown as the recipient of the 2018 Royal Gold Medal, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) president Ben Derbyshire, chair of the selection committee, highlighted the modernist architect’s “profound” contribution to the development of British housing and his successful achievement of high density without high rise.

“His pioneering ideas firmly placed the community at the heart of each of his developments, giving residents shared gardens, their own front door, innovative flexible living spaces and private outside space for every home,” Mr Derbyshire said.

“We were committed to the idea of social housing being to do with society.”

Yet, despite being celebrated today, Alexandra Road ended Mr Brown’s career in the UK because of a public inquiry into the scheme’s increased costs and delays. While the inquiry exonerated the architects, it stopped him getting more work here.

“It was perfectly frightful and it ended my career in England, totally,” says Mr Brown, who speaks so passionately and recalls everything in such great detail that it is initially difficult to ask a question. He left the council “in a state of almost nervous breakdown”.

Neave Brown in his living room on the Dunboyne Road Estate

Born in the US to an American mother and English father, Mr Brown moved to the UK when he was three and speaks with a British accent despite returning to live with an uncle outside New York during World War II.

He intended to go to art school after studying at the University of Oxford, but a young pilot named Bill Howell (later of the architecture practice Howell Killick Partridge & Amis) persuaded him to become an architect after they met in the art department at Marlborough College.

He studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London but never lost sight of his original plan: in his 70s, he spent four years at the City & Guilds of London Art School and his charcoal drawings are dotted around his living room. However it is the three sketches over his shoulder – sandwiched between his desk and two shelves of architectural tomes – that attract Inside Housing’s attention. They show the architect’s original drawings for the Alexandra Road and Dunboyne Road estates.

Paul Karakusevic, a partner at Karakusevic Carson Architects, who has met Mr Brown about eight times in the past four years, says the Royal Gold Medal winner’s “low-rise, design-led, site-specific” housing is relevant to what his practice, which has worked on social housing with about a dozen councils including Camden, is doing today.

He finds Mr Brown “incredibly inspiring”, highlighting that he was “able to work within the regulations and constraints of the day in an era of post-War austerity but still achieve the most imaginative and forward-thinking projects within a local authority context”.

“Everyone knows that those buildings [tower blocks] should never have been built"

The RIBA’s Mr Derbyshire has said the country “must now look back at Neave Brown’s housing ideals and his innovative architecture as we strive to solve the great housing crisis”. So what lessons does Mr Brown think architects and councils today can learn from his approach?

He believes his methods remain relevant, but that the Grenfell Tower tragedy means there is a “new background” to how the country should think about a renewed housing programme.

Any such scheme – which he insists must be sponsored by the government – has to be considered in the context of the “reassessment process” needed for existing high-rise blocks after the fire. Even if there are blocks which are “physically acceptable”, he suggests many are crowded with people on “improper incomes” who hate living there and with children not living on the ground floor.

The fire showed existing blocks to be “vulnerable because people now realise they are destroying society and destroying people’s lives”, Mr Brown adds. “Everyone knows that those buildings should never have been built and the kind of thesis that I and others of that period were talking about should have been the right one.”

A design pioneer 2

Dunboyne Road was the UK’s first high-density low-rise scheme

He advises a return to the Parker Morris space standards, which came out of Homes for Today and Tomorrow, a 1961 report into what is a reasonable internal size for public housing. A committee should be set up to reassess these standards, he adds, so as to produce a new series of requirements that it supervises council by council. However he says that rather than being dogmatic, the standards need to be “modifiable as experience goes along” and assessed in each situation.

In this way, he is looking back to a time before Margaret Thatcher “abandoned” social housing as a tenure. “She said there’s no such thing as society,” says Mr Brown, who, along with a group of like-minded architects with whom he studied, looked to create buildings that had a physical and sociocultural continuity with the city around them.

“The term ‘affordable housing’… is a lying delusion because it is a proportion of cost that is agreed, rather than costed at a level that people on low incomes can afford.”

“We were committed to the idea of social housing being social and to do with society. And then it became fragmentary and… something where they call it affordable housing. People use the term ‘affordable housing’ as: if they mean it, then it becomes affordable. It’s an utter and total lying delusion because it is a proportion of cost that is agreed, rather than being costed at a level that people on low incomes can afford to live at.”

Mr Brown also feels the UK can learn from other countries. After leaving Camden Council, as well as designing museum exhibitions and teaching, he worked on schemes abroad including developments in The Hague and Eindhoven in the Netherlands, although it is for his UK housing projects that he is most lauded.

He points out that since the end of 19th century, the UK’s local authorities have been left to pay for maintenance costs and any money raised for housing was not ringfenced.

By contrast, he says similar housing in the Netherlands has a programme “set up financially for the life of the building… not touchable by politics”.

“In the process of doing this they have discovered that, because they are having a good investment in quality buildings, the buildings achieve an equity almost at once and after a period of time they produce a high enough equity to help finance the next programmes,” says Mr Brown.

“So it is an idea of housing for the life of the building that can’t be managed or manipulated by the ordinary political process.”

But unless policymakers look at the overall problem – the need to build new housing and reassess existing tower blocks – he suggests any programme to tackle the housing crisis is destined to fail. Without a continuation of the Parker Morris standards, as well as a new committee to adjust those standards and every local authority having a new body to deal with new housing, “our society is going to break down”, he warns.

“It is as urgent as that.”

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