Developing a new format for urban housing: Neave Brown and the design of Camden's Fleet Road estate

Designed in 1966–67, Neave Brown's Fleet Road is recognised as the project that defined the character and language of the Camden housing projects from the years 1965–73 when Sydney Cook was Camden's borough architect. Yet while the Camden projects have been the subject of several historical studies, Fleet Road has received surprisingly little attention. The present article aims to redress this by examining the design of Fleet Road and the ideas that lay behind it. It shows how the design developed from a national and international discourse that flourished in the first half of the 1960s, not least at London's Architectural Association, where high-rise was unequivocally rejected in favour of low-rise high-density urbanism. It shows how Neave Brown's thinking was informed by this discourse but also by ideas emanating from the USA's East Coast schools, notably Cornell, where he was also teaching at the time. It charts the development of Brown's thinking through the Winscombe Street housing (1963–66) and in print, especially the 1967 essay ‘The form of housing’. Overall it shows how at Fleet Road the aspirations of high-density low-rise housing were taken by Brown and turned into the built reality of a local authority scheme on an inner-city site.