Mark Swenarton

Learning from architecture and conflict

Hebron, West Bank, April, 2010 Hebron embodies many of the issues related to architecture and conflict: occupation and division of land and city, checkpoints, blockades, walls, settlements, destruction of historical and patrimonial buildings, eviction from homes, creation of void and emptied areas, ‘colonisation from above’, rewriting of history, symbolic violence, humiliation by the use of space, control, harassment, terror through infrastructure. . . Walking through the empty streets of the A-Sahala area and the historic Palestinian fruit market—now a ‘ghost town’— 1

Tudor Walters and Tudorbethan: reassessing Britain's inter-war suburbs

The 1970s was a period of intense interest in Britains inter-war suburbs, leading in the first half of the 1980s to a flood of publications by British scholars, many of which remain standard works today. After the mid-1980s, however, interest in the subject subsided. In the 1990s suburbia again became the subject of substantial academic interest; but this time the focus has been more on post-war and contemporary suburbia and much of the impetus has come from North America and Australia rather than Britain. The paper explores the origins and nature of these two periods of scholarly interest in the suburbs and draws some conclusions regarding future research on Britains inter-war suburbs.

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

Designed in 1966–67, Neave Browns 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 Camdens 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 Londons Architectural Association, where high-rise was unequivocally rejected in favour of low-rise high-density urbanism. It shows how Neave Browns thinking was informed by this discourse but also by ideas emanating from the USAs East Coast schools, notably Cornell, where he was also teaching at the time. It charts the development of Browns 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.

Houses of paper and brown cardboard: Neville Chamberlain and the establishment of the Building Research Station at Garston in 1925

Neville Chamberlain’s significance in the history of twentieth‐century planning is well known. One key episode, however, has been overlooked: his role in the 1925 expansion and transfer to permanent premises of the Building Research Station (BRS), later known as the Building Research Establishment (BRE). The BRS had been established originally in 1921 but with temporary staff in temporary premises. In its post‐1925 form, the BRS was to have a world‐wide impact, both as a model for similar organizations in other countries and in the development of building science as a discipline. The paper shows how the espousal of new methods of construction formed a key part of the new approach to housing developed by Chamberlain as part of the ‘New Conservatism’ in 1924; how the promotion of new methods was inserted by Chamberlain into the 1924 Housing Act (Wheatley Act) introduced by the minority Labour government in 1924; and how, following the Conservatives’ return to power in November 1924, the BRS was transformed into something much larger in order to deliver ‘the Chamberlain programme’ of research for municipal housing. As such, the paper suggests that state‐funded building research formed the talisman of the social‐democratic confluence over state housing that emerged for the first time in Britain in the mid‐1920s.

Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978-1981

Designed in 1968–1969 by Neave Brown, Camdens Alexandra Road scheme in London is one of the most architecturally celebrated social housing schemes in Britain. But the project overran on both time and budget and before it was completed Camdens councillors launched a public enquiry (1978–1981) to find out what had gone wrong. Behind this lay much broader political changes, with radically different remedies to the economic crisis of the 1970s proposed by hard left and new right. Drawing on the unpublished papers of the enquiry and interviews with the key figures involved, including Neave Brown, Ken Livingstone and John Mills, the paper explores how this change of political alignments played out in the Alexandra Road public enquiry. It shows how the councillors struggled, in vain, to find evidence that the architect was to blame for the overruns; how an outside body, the National Building Agency, was brought in to pursue the investigation; and how successive attempts to identify a scapegoat (including an actionable report which had to be destroyed) proved unsuccessful. It shows how finally the enquiry was presented with an unpalatable discovery – that primary responsibility for what had happened lay not so much with the officers as with the councillors themselves.

Geared to producing ideas, with the emphasis on youth: the creation of the Camden borough architect's department under Sydney Cook

The housing projects designed by Camden borough council in London in the period 1965–73 when Sydney Cook was borough architect—which include Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane—are internationally recognised as being among the most important housing schemes of the past half century, providing a model for low-rise high-density urban housing that is still relevant today. Yet the programme of which these projects were the outcome has received scant attention from historians. This paper, which is the first published output from an ongoing research project, explores the institutional and organisational structures from which these projects emerged. Drawing on archival and other primary sources as well as interviews with many of the principal figures involved, it shows how the new borough, created under the 1963 London Government Act, developed the legacy of its constitutive boroughs—Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras—and how Camdens exceptional position, in terms of both wealth and location, was used by Sydney Cook to attract leading designers from Londons architectural world, including young graduates from the Architectural Association and elsewhere, to undertake a re-think of the design of inner-city housing.