Book Review: Cook's Camden
Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton
Lund Humphries, 2017
Hardcover, 328 pages
Back at the end of 1999 I took a trip with my family to London for the millennium festivities. Each day I would venture around the city looking at architecture and then join my family for dinner at a pub near the hotel. Most of my day outings focused on newer buildings, such as the Jubilee Line stations and Future Systems' Natwest Media Center, but one of the older buildings I went to see was Alexandra Road Estate, a housing project designed by Neave Brown and completed in 1979. (It's near Abbey Road, making it a two-in-one visit for architects that are fans of the Beatles.) The project is most noticeable for the long, curving concrete terraces facing a pedestrian walk, depicted on the cover of Cook's Camden, an impressive history of modern housing projects built in that corner of London under Camden borough architect Sydney Cook. Although the book tells the stories of numerous projects undertaken by different architects under Cook in the 1960s and 70s, Neave Brown's presence dominates, given that its release last year happened to coincide with the awarding of the RIBA Gold Medal to Brown, who died earlier this year at the age of 88.
In turn, having only visited Alexandra Road, my reading of the book focused on it and Brown's slightly earlier Fleet Road project (spread below). There was some overlap between the two projects in terms of approaches to stacking, u...
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