Neave Brown

Neave was chosen for the scheme by Jo Coenen, a Dutch admirer of his seminal work the Alexandra Road Estate in Camden, north London, which was the most complete expression of his philosophy. It was a project that made and broke his reputation. Conceived in the late 1960s, at a time when people began to realise that tower blocks could not provide adequate social housing — indeed, that they were entirely unsuitable for families — it appeared to offer a new way forward. The estate was built in the brutalist style, but, while high-density, it was low-lying and more sympathetic and humane than any other postwar estate of its size.

Comprising more than 500 apartments in curving concrete ziggurats, it nonetheless embraced a traditional vocabulary of streets and squares, with a four-acre park at the centre, “the picture in the frame”. Despite the constraints of the site, bounded by the West Coast Main Line to the north, every dwelling had its own front door opening on to a private external space, either a garden or a balcony, and bright and airy living spaces, plus underground parking. The structure next to the railway line was built on rubber pads to eliminate vibration. The complex contained a school, a youth club, workshops, commercial spaces and a community centre. It was, as Brown said, a “piece of city”.

Completed in 1979, Alexandra Road became the first postwar estate to be listed (at grade II*) only 14 years later. Brown’s two earlier projects in Camden — he only produced three in the UK — were also later listed, making him the only architect to have all his work in the country protected by law.

If the Alexandra Road project led to his later acclaim — he commanded a sell-out audience of 1,300 and a ten-minute standing ovation when he spoke at an event at the Hackney Empire shortly before his death — it also ended his career in architecture in Britain. With inflation running at 25 per cent, managing the project proved entirely beyond the council and finished way over budget and, after ten years of construction, behind schedule.

An inquiry was set up, which, it was hoped, would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the architect. As it transpired, Brown was exonerated, the council was blamed and the report was duly buried, but the fact that he had been investigated, and for so long, did irreparable damage. It was not immediately apparent to Brown, though. It took his sometime squash partner Sir James Stirling to point it out.

The diminutive Brown and the enormous Stirling, who later gave his name to the profession’s pre-eminent prize, must have made a strange sight on the squash court, but Stirling remained a lifelong friend, as did many of the leading lights of his generation. He asked to be shown around Alexandra Road after the inquiry, but as Brown pondered aloud what he would like to do next, Stirling suddenly exclaimed: “You do realise you’ll never work in architecture in this country again, don’t you?”

Neave Brown was born into a wealthy Anglo-American family — his British father, Percy, was a businessman and his American mother, Beatrice, worked in publishing — in Utica, New York. He was educated at Bronxville high school, New York, from 1939 until 1945 and in Britain, where he went to Marlborough College from 1945 until 1948. He won a place at Oxford to read English, but while doing his military service he decided to switch to architecture and applied to the Architectural Association, where he studied between 1950 and 1956. He would serve as vice-president between 1972 and 1974. He once recalled that “very little had been rebuilt after the war, there was still smog and food rationing, and we were confused schoolboys coming out of the army with a naive view that we wanted to change everything”.

He first worked for Lyons Israel Ellis, the prestigious practice where Stirling also cut his teeth, and for Middlesex council, before embarking on the first of his three UK projects, Winscombe Street, which was also in north London. At the time councils were prepared to provide a 100 per cent loan to housing co-operatives to fund new houses, provided that they met Whitehall specifications for space and cost. Brown duly formed one with four friends. Winscombe Street was to provide an early indication of Brown’s skill. He was able to deliver four bedrooms and two bathrooms in each of the houses for the same price as a three-bedroom, one-bathroom unit. Each “upside-down” home was also subdivided into zones: a children’s zone at the bottom with access to the garden; an adult zone at the top; and a kitchen, dining and entrance floor.

The project was completed in 1966. He would live there happily for many years with his wife, Janet Richardson, a former journalist who worked in the NHS. They had met through mutual friends and raised three children: Victoria, who works with young children; Aaron, a cabinet-maker; and Zoe, a chef. They all survive him. The children recall how he would toil diligently at his desk with a cat draped across his shoulders as they played, pausing only to swim “for ages” at the nearby Swiss Cottage pool.

Impressed by Brown’s work, Sydney Cook, the chief architect for the Camden authority, hired him. Camden was at the time one of the richest of the local authorities formed in 1965 in London, and equally ambitious. Under Cook, Brown embarked on the second of his housing projects, Fleet Road, now the Dunboyne Estate. There he would develop many of the ideas that he later employed at Alexandra Road. He created a “carpet” of 72 maisonettes and flats facing each other across a street, rather than a high-rise tower, giving them generous open-plan interiors and extensive gardens.

At the time there was a presumption that the only way to tackle the housing crisis of the period was through towers, but Brown’s response was to develop a new typology — “High Density Low Rise” — which provided the same number of homes in a manner reminiscent of the traditional terrace, maintaining a sense of ownership and privacy. Fleet Road was a breakthrough.

Alexandra Road was to be the ultimate expression of Brown’s approach. It wasn’t all plain sailing, of course. Councillors decried the project as a white elephant, although it soon proved to be the most popular estate in the borough. The innovative heating system, built into party walls, failed during the first winter, leading to an “Ice cold in Alex” headline in a local paper.

His plans to incorporate a youth club were refused, leading him to include a space marked “service centre annexe” on the plans for the grounds, because no one at the council would be prepared to admit that they did not know what this meant. Told just before construction began that there was a pressing need to include just such an amenity, he was able to reply: “I think I know where I can put it.”

Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate in Camden

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While Alexandra Road proved to be a success, the tide was turning. The new Thatcher government of 1979 had little appetite for social housing. A man of the left, Brown was a voracious reader and debater of politics and history to the end. “The Thatcher government abandoned council housing and the ideal of the socially balanced, free and mixed society we wanted to create with it,” he said. “Every single thing we believed in . . . was abandoned.”

Having left Camden when the inquiry began, Brown concentrated on designing exhibitions, such as Thirties British Art and Design (1979) and Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century (1987) — both at the Hayward Gallery — and worked abroad, teaching in Germany at Karlsruhe university. He undertook a further three housing projects on the Continent, in Bergamo in Italy, the Hague and Eindhoven.

After Eindhoven he gave up architecture and returned to his schoolboy ambition, completing a fine-art degree at the City & Guilds in London. In later life he enjoyed producing abstract paintings and spent many happy hours at a house that he and his wife had bought at Saint Laurent le Minier in the south of France in 1999.

While he may have cancelled his subscriptions to architectural magazines and given up on the profession, the profession had not given up on him. There was a resurgence of interest in his work, partly kick-started by the listings and partly by the recognition that he was the last of the great architects of social housing. He was delighted to be presented with the 2018 Royal Gold Medal, in recognition of a lifetime’s work, at a ceremony brought forward to October last year. It took place months after the Grenfell Tower disaster had shown the perils of the tower blocks he disliked so much.

“What astonished me is that people are looking at [my] buildings again,” he said in an interview after the presentation. “Perhaps after the fire they seem relevant again. Perhaps it could be the beginning of a new rethinking of architecture . . . what a way to end!”

Neave Brown, architect, was born on May 22, 1929. He died of cancer on January 9, 2018, aged 88