Article on the importance of our Estate in The Guardian newspaper
Interesting article in the Guardian written by Owen Hatherway on the importance of our estate and others like it built by Camden in the 1970s as part of a “spacial redistribution of wealth”. In particular how Sydney Cook and a team of architects working for Camden at the time were committed to building high quality council housing. As Hathaway says “Under the borough architect Sydney Cook, Camden in particular built possibly the finest working-class housing ever provided in British history – estates such as Highgate New Town, Alexandra Road and Branch Hill, all of them low-rise, sharply (but not bleakly) modernist, based around pedestrian streets, and finished to an exceptionally high standard”. As residents we are glad and proud that our estate is getting full recognition, not only for the excellent design, but also for the democratic ideas that lay behind it. Let’s hope that councils can one day once again start building places like it in the centre of our cities. Read the full article here. October 2013
