• WHILE it is beyond question that Neave Brown, the late architect of the Alexandra Road Estate in Camden, was a “giant of social housing” I would like to dispel any misconception that a great architect is a genius working in isolation (Neave Brown: architect who transformed Camden dies aged 88, January 11).

Many of the reports marking Neave’s death have understandably concentrated on the beauty of his architectural language: an astonishingly musical composition of repeating, modulating rhythms, proportions, and nuances.

But this modernist language was not of Neave’s personal invention. It dates from a long way back, perhaps to the 1920s in Vienna and many other places. Other architects are continuing to develop it today.

This is simply to describe the very cosmopolitan cultural atmosphere that surrounded Neave as he worked; and that also surrounded the other architects in Camden architects’ department under Sydney Cook, in the 1960s and 1970s, and who brought their own interpretations to the modern aesthetic: inventive architects like Peter Tabori, Gordon Benson, Alan Forsyth, and others.

Dan Carrier’s article also included appreciative remarks from politicians like Frank Dobson. So I think it’s also worth making clear that Neave Brown’s outstanding social housing for Camden could never have been built without the resolute backing of Frank and many other political leaders, who had to fight tremendous battles to get those pioneering projects through administrative and financial minefields.

In other words Neave Brown, for all his brilliance and originality, was working very much as part of a cultural and political choral effort consisting of big teams of people, all motivated by the great socialist ideal of implementing a large-scale programme to build an enormous quantity of council housing for ordinary working people that was the best money could buy, designed to space standards that have never been bettered, technologically very advanced for its time and a joy to inhabit.

Today, alas, Tory cuts have made it difficult for Camden systematically to maintain these masterpieces as they deserve, and neo-liberal tendencies such as Right to Buy, Buy to Let, and airb’n’b have meant that some of these estates, which Neave intended to be homes for everyone, have partly fallen into private hands.

Now we are seeing fly-by-night, transient, tenants who do not bother to get to know their neighbours and do not look out for one another or participate in the community.

So while we look forward to the arrival of a Labour government that has promised it will terminate Right to Buy, let’s not celebrate Neave Brown as a solitary genius.

The dramatic beauty of his architecture has its roots in that collective idea that enabled him and his team to complete their masterpieces working in concert with many others, not least of whom were the mainly Irish workmen who toiled to pour the concrete, lay the blockwork, plaster the walls, hang the doors, and all the other skilled construction tasks.

So I hope our tribute to him can be a celebration of the collective socialist ideals he himself espoused and that gave his architecture its soul.

As we begin to start thinking about social housing again, let’s take to heart his own final exhortation last October when he said: “Neo-liberalism has stripped out the social ideology from our country and led to a ruinous economy with ruinous housing.

“I’m an old, old, man so my answer is probably not the right one, but I think we need a new national agency to govern standards and fund the construction of housing for properly mixed communities – crucially with maintenance costs financed for the whole life of the building.”

Neave has left us with a job to do, and surely our best epitaph for him would be to get on with it. RIP to a great socialist architect.

TOM MUIRHEAD
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