Since the early 1950s,
tower blocks surrounded by public open space had been the method of choice for councils to replace
terraced housing in poor condition while keeping the same high
population density. However, by the mid-1960s, even before the collapse of
Ronan Point, the shortcomings of that method were becoming apparent.
Neave Brown believed that
ziggurat style terraces, little higher than the terraces they replaced, could provide a better solution. Vehicular traffic could be restricted to basement level. Family-sized flats, bright and airy due to the set-back upper floors, could open, via their own "
defensible" front garden, onto ground floor streets/play areas, whilst the higher levels could be used for smaller flats, each with a private balcony. The Alexandra Road Estate may be seen as Brown's culminating, and largest scale, effort to apply these principles to the design of high-density public housing. Five houses on
Winscombe Street, built in 1967, were his first experiment with the terrace type. The
Fleet Road project, begun about the same time and consisting of 71 houses, a shop, and a studio, arranged in parallel terraced rows, was a further application of the idea.
Public inquiry The estate received much criticism during and after its construction because of its very high cost (particularly compared with tower blocks), caused by the complicated nature of its construction, unforeseen foundation problems, and the delays caused by those at a time of very high inflation, reaching 20% per year at one point in the 1970s. In 1978 a
public inquiry was launched by the
Labour-run council to investigate the reasons for overshooting the budget and timetable. Although there were indeed a significant delay and an increase in cost of approximately four times the originally commissioned tender, the inquiry may have been politically motivated. Mark Swenarton cites several factors for its launch: the campaigning
Conservatives tried to allege that Labour was incompetent in managing the council and an increasingly pressured Labour hoping to relieve itself from the public anger of the spending by raising the transparency and potentially find the roots of the problem with the Conservative leadership 1968–1971. The outcome of the inquiry published in seven reports mainly made "the apparent failure of the councillors to understand the contractual obligations that they had undertaken" responsible for the mismanagement and was not successful in blaming the architect as had been hoped by some. Despite there being no findings of a mismanagement on his part, however, being the subject of a public inquiry destroyed Neave Brown's reputation in the UK where he never built again.
Alexandra Road Estate today The estate has suffered less vandalism than many Camden estates, and it was granted
Grade II* listed status on 18 August 1993, the first post-war council housing estate to be listed. It was described by
Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, as "one of the most distinguished groups of buildings in England since the Second World War." After a continuing career including international
town planning and post-graduate teaching, Brown retrained as a
fine artist, to which occupation he devoted his retirement. In October 2017, Brown won the
Royal Gold Medal of the
Royal Institute of British Architects. Brown died, aged 88, in January 2018. ==Other sites==