Alexandra Road Park by Jonathan R. Williamson

Alexandra Road Park PG Dip. Landscape Architecture: Theory AR7021 2016/17 University of East London 22 December 2017

JR Williamson

Alexandra Road Park

PREFACE This brief of this report was examine Alexandra Road Park in Camden along many dimensions including its history, social and architectural context, functional analysis, usage, materiality, and planting. Through a process of first hand site visits over a period of weeks, research and analysis, a broad and complex picture emerges of the factors behind the development of the site and ultimately the experience of park as seen today.

Alexandra Road Park

CONTENTS

Introduction

History, Development and Architectural Context

Landform and Functional Analysis

Materiality

Planting

Usage

Conclusions

References and Bibliography

Alexandra Road Park

Introduction 0.0

Alexandra Road Park is an urban neighbourhood park located in the London Borough of Camden. The park sits at the heart of the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate - a social housing project completed in the late 1970s - and was conceived as an integrated aspect of the whole estate.

According to the website of a local support group (friendsofalexandraroadpark.com) it forms “a green oasis in a built up urban area of inner London“ and is a “rare and highly acclaimed example of late 20th Century landscape design“.

Fig. 1 Eastern view of the park

a “rare and highly acclaimed example of late 20th Century landscape design”

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 2 Location in the Borough: ward of Swiss Cottage Statistics: London Borough of Camden Population: 246,200 Density: 29,000/sq mi Ethnicity:

44% White British 3.2% White Irish 0.1% White Gypsy or Irish Traveller 19% Other White 1.1% White & Black Caribbean 0.8% White & Black African 1.8% White & Asian 1.9% Other Mixed 2.8% Indian 0.7% Pakistani 5.7% Bangladeshi 2.9% Chinese 02

4% Other Asian 4.9% Black African 1.6% Black Caribbean 1.7% Other Black 1.6% Arab 2.3% Other

Source: wikipedia

Fig. 3 Boundary of the park

The park has an area of 3 acres (1.243 Ha)

The site is bordered to the north and south by two pedestrian streets, Rowley Way and Ainsworth Way respectively, which are the main thoroughfares of the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate. Principal road borders are Abbey Road to the west and Boundary Road to the south.

The London and Birmingham West Coast Main Line runs to the north of the site, completed in 1838. Alexandra Road was named after Princess Alexandra to commemorate her marriage to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1863. The most famous resident of the road was Lily Langtry (1853â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1929), music hall singer and stage actress and mistress of the same Prince of Wales. Her house in Alexandra Road (by 1965 an area of some 600 decaying Victorian villas) had to be demolished to make way for the development. She is remembered in the name of Fig. 4 Alexandra Road in the 19th century. Langtry Walk. To give a sense of scale Langtry Walk is 350m end to end. A vestige of Alexandra Road remains to the east of the park.

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 5 Rowley Way

Photo Credit: By Oxyman - Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1795974

The entire estate is known locally as Rowley Way, a pedestrian street onto which face the ziggurat housing blocks designed by Neave Brown. This estate was to become the signature work of his career. Alexandra Road Park runs parallel to this street.

History, Development and Architectural Context

London Borough of Camden acquired the 13.5 acre site in 1968 with a view to create a social housing estate with homes for 1600 people. The architect Neave Brown, an employee in Camden Council’s own architects department had overall authority for the masterplan and design of both the estate (Rowley Way) and Alexandra Road Park (ARP). After 4 years in design and planning, construction of the estate commenced in 1972 and was completed in 1978. Along with the park and 520 apartments, the site also included a school, community centre, youth club and heating complex. The principal construction material is white, site-cast, unpainted reinforced concrete.

Social Housing and Post-war Modernism 1945-1975

It‘s important to note that the park and its immediate environment, the surrounding housing estate, are inextricably linked in an integrated design concept which is elaborated upon below. To understand the architectural context is to get an insight into how the park, with its unusual and ambitious landscaping, came about.

As mentioned to understand the estate and the park necessitates a brief examination of some of the key inflection points in Post War Modernism and specifically with respect to social housing. The 30 years following end of WWII was considered the golden era of social housing in Britain. One million homes were built during the period of Clement Atlee’s post war government alone. This figure rose to a peak of around 200,000 council dwellings a year by the mid to late sixties. Cheap and high density social housing initially followed the hugely influential Corbusian model involving slab blocks floating over parkland with little connection to the landscape, as seen in the UK at the Alton Estate, Roehampton (Fig.7). What we see here is sometimes referred to as the heroic period of Modernism: uncompromising modernist buildings engaging with a social brief and often classified (or mis-classified) as Brutalist.

Fig. 6 Cité radieuse, Marseille 1947-52. Le Corbusier

Fig. 7 Alton Estate, Roehampton 1952-58

Alexandra Road Park

The Modernist principle of maximum densities were to be achieved with minimum land use. A notable example at the zenith of this heroic phase in the UK is the 31 storey Trellick Tower designed in the Brutalist style by architect Ernő Goldfinger.

However, by the early 1960s architects were already beginning to question this interpretation of Modern movement. The partial collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968, a cheaply constructed tower block in Canning Town, was to become seen as a tragic pointer towards the demise of the social high rise era. By the mid 1970s, “doubts about construction methods, management problems and social consequences had halted high-rise building” [Couch 2012]. A late Modernist phase starts to emerge exploring low rise design also inspired by Le Corbusier, but now himself developing the idea of the “continuous mat”.

Fig. 8 Trellick Tower, West London

100m high / 217 flats Commissioned 1966. Completed 1972. Grade II* listed The political and intellectual climate for the development of a new typology of social housing was exemplified in the form of Camden Council’s Architects Department. According to [Boughton, 2018] the newly formed and wealthy borough was run by a “young and ambitious” Labour council for whom “ ‘the main aim was more housing – beginning and end’ and conscious of its flagship role made for some of the most exciting council housing of modern times”. Both the architectural and the social ambition were pressing for Neave Brown. His stated aim for the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate was to create “a model of democratic architecture…to render irrelevant the sad distinction between public and private housing“.

Fig. 9 The “continuous mat”. Proposal for a Venice hospital, 1965. Le Corbusier.

Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate – Design Precedents

Fig. 10

1. Bishopsfield Estate Examples of this later phase of Modernism which have a direct lineage to the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate include Michael Neylan’s Bishopsfield Estate in Harlow New Town (Fig.10).

This was low rise / low density Danish-inspired scheme which explored ‘a total indoor/outdoor environment of a type hardly known before in English domestic work’ [Couch, 2012].

2. Lillington Gardens Pimlico, 1961-72 Other projects which were influential to Neave Brown were Lillington Gardens in Pimlico (Fig. 11) and Halen Estate in Switzerland (Fig.12). One can see a clear shift towards low rise, lower density terraced apartments starting to demonstrate a visible relationship to landscape. 3. Halen Siedlung Switzerland

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

The ‘stepped and jumbled forms’ derived from le Corbusier’s wartime Rob et Roq housing in the south of France [Couch 2012]

Density The initial policy brief issued by Camden Council stipulated 136 persons per acre, Planning asked for 150, Brown won the day by promising 210 – a figure higher than most high-rise schemes achieve [Broughton, 2018]. 07

Alexandra Road Park

Neave Brown wrote about his approach to housing in 1967, just before Alexandra Road was conceived:

‘Attitudes towards housing are changing… it is as if the accommodation which was recently piled in slabs and towers, ….has been compressed and flattened out to fill the extremes of the site. Instead of buildings standing as objects in an open space, the buildings tend to form a continuous texture and the open space becomes geometrically finite and positively organised, an element of the design.’ Essentially then, the design conceit of Alexandra Road Park is to extend the form and texture of the surrounding architecture and create a series of functional geometric spaces or outdoor rooms connected by a series of walkways, ramp, steps, and many level changes. The material quality and aesthetic of the estate architecture is explicitly continued into and throughout the park forming a consistent spatial geometry.

The second narrative concerns treatment of nature. Despite the rejection of heroicism there is also another, more resilient, trait of Modernism still at work : the 18th century idea of landscape as romantic or sublime is in opposition to the idea of landscape as “geometrically finite and positively organised”. Browns notion of “continuous texture” signals that landscape is somehow not “other” to architecture. His intention was to create a “piece of city” unified in itself and integrated in its neighbourhood. He said of this estate: “the whole building is a landscape, with its ‘hanging gardens’ and park.”

Embedded Narratives Underlying Brown’s architectural approach there are two embedded narratives which we can understand in terms of oppositional forces. Firstly a rejection of the high Modernist slab tower with its failed trope of figure-ground separation. With the Alexandra & Ainsworth estate there is a clear move towards an integrated relationship between dwelling and landscape.

Fig. 12 Opposition: figure-ground versus integrated landscape

Fig. 13 Opposition: landscape as other versus a finite extension of geometry

Alexandra Road Park

Landscape Architecture In 1976 landscape architect Janet Jack was appointed as Landscape Architect with a brief to design all the green landscape for the park, detailed designs within the playgrounds (consistent with the design aesthetic) , all the planting and its protection, watering systems etc. throughout the entire Alexandra Road project.

The landscape scheme was constructed in phases between 1977 and 1980.

Jack‘s Design Priorities • a low maintenance landscape with tough planting

• a landscape into which a large number of residents and others could be absorbed comfortably

• visual separation of the areas and many of the functions with planting

• The key to the design would be in the large scale use of plants • provide calm, relaxing spaces to sit, pause, rest and relax Fig. 14 ARP in 1981 after completion of Jack’s landscape scheme

• planting to flower, fruit, appeal to all the senses and reflect the changing seasons (and attract wildlife) • detailing consistent with the design aesthetic • conjuring a “feeling of timeless countryside”

Fig. 15 Neave Brown’s original park design (top) and his early plan of the park as redesigned to incorporate separate playgrounds and Play Centre. [Couch 2012] 10

Timeline of the Park 1968 London Borough of Camden buys the 13.5 acre site Estate designed by the architect Neave Brown

1969 Integrated concept presented to the Camden Council 1973 Site clearance and foundations begins

1974 Construction of buildings underway Requirements for 4 specific playgrounds and a five aside football pitch together with a Play Centre building were added. Brown redesigns the landscape to include the new re quirements maintaining the use of levels, and adding a variety of routes and spaces including the walled playgrounds. the overall design, shape and levels of the park within a ‘valley of buildings’ is now fixed 1976

• reinterpret the original play landscapes with new playgrounds reflecting current best practice • improve biodiversity across the site • enable the original design intent to be experienced and appreciated by a wide range of local residents and visi tors. J & L Gibbons Landscape Architects and Erect Architec ture appointed as the designers for the park restoration, Project-managed by Around the Block on behalf of Camden 2015 Restoration works complete. Park reopens in July.

Landscape architect Janet Jack appointed. Jack designs: - all the green landscape for the park - all planting and its protection, watering system etc - playgrounds details

1978 Landscape construction begins 1980 Landscape construction completed

1990- Park falls into disrepair during 1990s. Play equipment had been removed

1993 Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate awarded Grade II* listing 2010 Local residents started work on a bid for funding to restore and improve the park, and formed a partnership with Camden Council. 2013 The project received £1.5m funding through the joint Heritage Lottery Fund and Big Lottery funded ‘Parks for People’ programme.

This enabled an ambitious project to be delivered which aimed to: • restore and enhance the original park landscapes and planting • restore the hard landscaping and improve accessibility 11

Alexandra Road Park

Landform and Functional Analysis

Summary The landscape forms an integral part of the overall architectural scheme. The east/west swathe of public green space, between blocks B and C, is intersected diagonally by wall of in-situ, board-marked, white concrete, forming a highly structured series of outdoor â&#x20AC;&#x153;roomsâ&#x20AC;?. This division, springing from two pedestrian routes between blocks B and C, is reinforced and further subdivided by changes of level, tree and shrub planting and timber fencing, to create spaces of varied size, shape and character. Some are furnished with playground equipment and others are laid to grass. [Camden, 2006]

The park is highly compartmentalised into discrete zones. Much of the real estate is given over to play areas aimed at different age groups and activities. Zone 1 - playgrounds 4 and 5 Play areas for young children (3-8 yrs) - slides and swings, climbing structures Zone 2 - The Mound All ages. Grassy area popular with dog walkers

Zone 3 - Playgrounds 2 and 3 Ball court (s) and climbing frames (2) aimed at older children and teenagers. Zone 4 - The Bowl Grassy area - picnics, frisbee, walkers.

Zone 5 - Games Pitch Caged area approx. 50m x 25m. Hard surface suitable for games, principally football

Zone 6 - The Hive and Circulation The Hive is a multi-use community centre. Currently under extensive refurbishment.

Fig. 16 Axonometric sketch with indicative planting 13

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 17 Zone 1 - Playgrounds 4 and 5 Graphic credit - Billy Webb

Fig. 18 Play equipment: playgrounds 5 and 4

Fig. 19 Sections of Playgrounds 4 and 5

Fig. 20 Plan of Playgrounds 4 and 5

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 21 Zone 2 - The Mound Graphic credit - Billy Webb

Fig. 22 Zone 3 - Playgrounds 2 and 3 Graphic credit - Billy Webb

Fig. 23 Zone 4 - The Bowl Graphic credit - Billy Webb

Fig. 24 Zone 5 - Games pitch Graphic credit - Billy Webb

Fig. 25 Zone 6 - The Hive Graphic credit - Billy Webb

After an exhaustive journey through the park, taking in all the zones, and exploring all the perimeter and subsidiary paths (see fig. 26), one might be inclined to summarize this scheme (estate and park) as a Gesamtkunstwerk. This expression translates from the German as a “total work of art” or a synthesis of the arts. Brown referred to the whole site as a “unique sculptured landscape”.

Alexandra Road Park

Circulation

Key

The diagram below sets out the pedestrian circulation routes both within the park and also the those connecting to the wider estate area.

Red: ZONE DIVISIONS

Rowley Way or Langtry Walk provide a more direct route for pedestrians travelling from Abbey Road in the direction of Swiss Cottage (or vice versa) and avoid the complexity of the subsidiary paths within the park.

Fig. 26 Circulation Routes

Dark Blue: PEDESTRIAN PERIMETER AND THROUGH TRAFFIC Light Blue: PARK SUBSIDIARY PATHS Yellow: VEHICULAR

Alexandra Road Park

Materiality

The image of stairwell below, taken close to the east entrance of the park (zone 1), shows a very typical site condition. According to the Concrete Society â&#x20AC;&#x153;moss, lichens, algae and other growths are often associated with concrete that has a high moisture contentâ&#x20AC;?. Keeping concrete looking fresh requires regular maintenance by jet-wash or the application of water-resistant coatings. With the lack of maintenance evident in ARP, these green lichens quickly develop and lend a

quality of neglect and decay to the surroundings.

Fig. 27 Spiral stair detail: lichen grows on site-cast concrete 21

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 28 Raised beds, bench, steps and pavings slabs : concrete.

The single most striking quality of the hard landscaping in Alexandra Road Park is the ubiquitious use of concrete. Throughout all the playgrounds, hard-courts, walls and raised beds, interstital ramps walkways and steps, and much of the seating, concrete is the material of choice. Although tempered by the (now mature) soft landscaping, there is still a heaviness and monotony to this material quality. This feeling is yet heightened by the fact that sight lines a generally quite short and any visible buildings on the periphery of the park present the exact same material quality.

Fig. 29 Underpass and steps : concrete

Fig. 30 Timber terracing

Softwood timber planks are used a feature for simple terracing on some of the sloped earth banks. However, it is used inconsistently and seems only moderately effective to preventing soil slip. Stained timber also makes an appearance as device to soften the edges of the connecting walk ways and as back rest for bench seating (fig. 33).

Fig. 31 Brick and stone

Fig. 32 Brick and stone

Red brick is laid down as paving on Rowley Way, although curiously does not make an appearance in the park. However some areas of the park are laid with a stone cobble - also with out a an obvious strategy.

Fig. 33 Concrete and timber benches

Alexandra Road Park

Planting Study Janet Jackâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s original planting scheme included evergreen and deciduous, flowering and fruiting shrubs with a backing of trees of many species. These created a dense backdrop of foliage appropriate for the scale of the surrounding architecture. Use of planting and hedges was intended to multi-functional, including privacy and wind protection but not least â&#x20AC;&#x17E; to emphasise the three dimensional qualities of the design [Couch 2012 p.33] The playgrounds, especially 4 and 5 are very well served with the protection of mature trees which separate them from the urban surroundings creating a tranquil environment.

The planting is of primarily three season interest. Winter is not well represented with colour. The majority of trees are deciduous. Evergreen shrubs included fatsia, aucuba and buxus.

Fig. 32 Passiflora caerulea - blue passion flower

Fig. 32 Senecio 25

Alexandra Road Park

Examples of Original Planting

Prunus - flowering Cherry trees line a stretch of Langtry walk

Robinina Pseudoacacia

Cotoneaster â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Cornubiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;,

Sorbus hupehensis - Hubei rowan

Hedera Helix - Common Ivy

Betula pendula - Silver Birch

Cortaderia selloana - Pampass Grass

Fig. 35 Tamarix - Tamarisk on Rowley Way

Fig. 35 Lime Trees in the Mound

Alexandra Road Park

Usage Four site visits were made to Alexandra Road Park between October and December 2017. The duration of each was between 45 and 60 minutes. The table below records the people and activities observed during each visit.

The figures were surprisingly low across all visits especially considering the high population density of the housing estate in the immediate vicinity estate, and the wider urban area.

The main observation was that few people except runners use the park as a cut-through to another destination. Virtually all users were residents and/or there for a specific activity e.g. dog walking/football. Date

Time

0-13 1421

21+ Total

Observations

27.10

2pm

Children in playgrounds 4 and 5. Roller skater playground 3

21.11

10am

Children and parents in playgrounds 3. Dog walkers. Joggers.

11.11 4.12

3pm

11am

15 1

19 5

11 youths playing football. Teenagers in a group smoking cannabis. Father with child. Dog walker Dog walkers. Joggers.

Interview with local resident 11 Nov 3:30pm

“No problems since the cameras were installed” “It’s one of the safest estates I know of in this area”

Location: The Mound - local woman walking a dog:

“I walk my dog here everyday. At this time of year I don’t stay long but in the summer I like to sit on that bench...” (pointing) “It’s lovely just to walk here...it’s really nice. I’ve been living here since it was built in the 1970s.”

“These days I just come here with the dog. When my kids were growing up we used the playgrounds” “In the ‘90s it went though a bad state with boys causing trouble. The upgrade was needed doing badly” 29

Alexandra Road Park

Conclusion

When drawing any conclusions about ARP it is important to establish the criteria for assessment. Considering the age of the park it is useful to make a distinction between the park as a successful public space in its own right, seen through a 21st lens but equally to examine how the park (and estate) has fared as an example of its time and in relation to other contemporaneous schemes of that era. In that sense, the first criteria needs to be a historical assessment. This will be followed by a summary of observations and local views established through field trips and finally a qualitative assessment by the author of this report.

To name but two high profile and nearby examples of Hatherley’s “chaos” one needs to look no further than Robin Hood Gardens in Blackwall (completed 1972 - scheduled for demolition 2017) and the Heygate Estate, Elephant and Castle (completed 1974 – demolished 2011-2014).

Part 1: Historical assessment

History has been kind to Rowley Road/ARP and to understand why we need again to reiterate the Postmodern shift in sensibility towards Modernism. “Modernism, in Britain especially, is seen as a remnant of a very different historical conjuncture to that of our own – that embarrassing recent past, the ‘interregnum’ of Socialism or Social Democracy that we’re constantly reminded ended in late-70’s chaos.” [Hatherley, 2008 pp.8-9]

Fig. 36 Heygate Estate - demolished 2014

Note that both of these social housing projects were almost exactly contemporaneous with Rowley Way and ARP. Both also made provision for a central green space but arguably not nearly as well integrated as ARP. Several high profile campaigns were launched to get Robin Hood Garden listed and save it from demolition. None were successful and yet Rowley Way was granted Grade II* listed status in 1993 [Historic England, 2017] the first post-war council housing estate to be so listed. It was described by Peter Brooke, then Heritage Secretary, as “one of the most distinguished groups of buildings in England since the Second World War”. This was well before the 30 years normally required before a building may be listed and was done so “to ensure any refurbishment matched original specifications” [Broughton 2018] .

Fig. 37 Robin Hood Gardens - demolished 2017-

Alexandra Road Park

Fig. 38 - Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate from the air.

It can be seen that Rowley Way/ARP has been recognised as having a special and distinctive quality absent from many of its contemporaries. Undoubtedly the provision and integration of Alexandra Road Park as a central element of the scheme was a major success factor in this outcome. “His intention was to create a ‘piece of city’ unified in itself and integrated in its neighbourhood” [Couch 2012] Its primary purpose and indeed raison d’être of the park was to serve the residents of the estate and it has been doing so more or less successfully for 45 years. According to [Couch 2012] Alexandra Road Park is “a valuable example of a post war landscape… and is of special significance because much of the original topography and design is still intact” . Part 2: Observations and Local Views The link between the condition of the park and usage of the park was made in the Conservation Management Plan [Couch 2012] which noted “the park has suffered from lack of maintenance and is in very poor condition. As a result, many areas of the park are today under-used even by the community which overlooks it.”

This report was, of course, written before the £1.5m refurbishment funded by the Heritage Lottery Grant. However, despite the recent injection of money to resurrect the playgrounds and planting in the spirit of the original scheme, the study visits to ARP (albeit anecdotal rather than systematic) were consistent in their findings that the park is still little used today. Fig. 39 - Overgrown planting

Fig. 40 - Abandoned bicycle

Planting is overgrown in many places. Litter was noted although is not huge problem. A more serious issue was the many sightings of fly tipping : abandoned furniture and other general refuse simply left in the park on nearby walkways.

On a more positive note, there are signs of on-going maintenance and repair. The community space known as The Hive (fig. 40), for example, is going through a major refurbishment which could bring a new lease of life to the park through a revival of community activity. On a functional level the park does score well depending on your demographic. Children, parents with children and sports facilities served well. Much of the real estate is devoted to play spaces for children or teenagers- a story worth celebrating were there more evidence of usage.

Based on a small sample of local views (also anecdotal), feelings of residents were generally positive.

Fig. 40 - The Hive under refurbishment Part 3: Qualitative Assessment

In his influential text Between Buildings and People [Willats, 1996] explores the effect of the modernist built environment on people and how they express themselves. Based on extensive interviews with residents of numerous post-war housing estates, Willats paints a picture of the successes and failures of social housing of that era. In one such interview conducted in 1981 on the Avondale Estate, Hayes, West London (completed mid 1960s) the following exchange is recorded: “ SW: Are you conscious of the fact that the architect is telling you how to live? PP: Yes, he’s tried to organise the life here but he’s not been able to organise it around anything central. We’ve got a big green that the kids are supposed to play on, but they’ve taken the swings away from there; they’ve only got a seesaw left and you can’t have any community feeling when there’s nowhere for people to meet and to communicate “ [Willats, 1996 p.61] Neave Brown would have been well aware of the failings of the Avondale Estate and other contemporaneous housing projects. Central to the design arrangement of the Alexandra Road estate is the park, there precisely to address the need for a place for the community to meet, play and socialise. However, in his ambition to create a model of “democratic architecture”, one has to ask how autocratic

Alexandra Road Park

was the architect himself? Putting it more directly, the question posed by Willats to the Avondale resident could be equally asked of Brown’s scheme: is the architect telling you how to live?

The scheme of ARP could not reasonably be described as having a “light touch”. It’s is heavily designed, zoned extensively and deliberately employs and extends the architectural vernacular of the surrounding estate. The design conceit of the “continuous mat” extending into the park is quite evident but as experienced today it ultimately feels contrived and essentially prescriptive. In the sense that ARP or any other public space feels prescriptive then there is an inevitable logic that architect/designer is exercising an unwelcome level of control over usage and experience of the space.

As discussed previously, Modernism, particularly in relation to social housing went through a number of episodic “turns”. However, in the core DNA of the entire movement one sees the common characteristic of “top-down” thinking repeated endlessly. Perhaps the question of whether the architecture of ARP is autocratic is somewhat rhetorical; Neave was an unabashed Modernist and the impulse of Modernism was always highly dogmatic. From the very first ragings of Adolf Loos in Ornament an Crime (1910) and subsequently for over half a century the movement (in general) pushed onwards towards abstraction whilst embodying a “vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art”[Hughes, 2006] Hughes also observes “[Modernist] design - the rethinking from zero on up of everything from teapots to whole cities - was imagined as potentially all-powerful”.

This sensibility is tangible in ARP. Rather than create a simple green space permitting, and indeed promoting, an unregulated freedom of movement, Neave and to some extent Janet Jack, rethink the format into an architectural extension of living space. Compared to con-

temporary design thinking, the landscape architecture of ARP seems over-bearing and out dated. It creates a sense that one is not really enjoying a park/parkland at all but rather passing through a series of semi-private highly designated functional spaces to which one is either welcome or not. Much of the real estate is allocated to the playgrounds – perhaps rightly so – but for adults without children these become non-spaces. The Mound and the Meadow offer a brief respite from the heavy materiality and nod towards the kind of freedoms to be expected and enjoyed in green space. However the sightlines and experiences here are equally short lived and abruptly terminated. Moving on, the paths and ramps lead us on inexorably to another pocket of closed off, uninviting space.

In the ARP Conservation Management Plan [Couch 2012 p.29] lists a number of Brown’s considerations affecting the landscape design including a desire to create “a series of episodes united to create a variety of open and closed spaces with a certain surprise and mystery, linked by a choice of routes providing alternative ways of walking about”. In practice this quality of “surprise and mystery” manifests as short sightlines, blind corners and level of anxiety as to who or what is ahead of or behind you. The “choice of routes” can be quite bewildering on first visit and proves ultimately unsatisfactory as the routes (longer or shorter) always take you in the same general direction to the next episode which has a very similar quality of space to the previous. Quite quickly this device of apparent choice proves unwarranted if not affected.

Alexandra Road Park

References and Bibliography Boughton, J. 2018 . Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing . Verso 2018 [online: https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/ the-alexandra-road-estate-camden-a-magical-moment-for-englishhousing/] Accessed December 2017

[Camden, 2006] Alexandra Road Estate Management Guidelines 2nd Edition. Camden Council , 2006 [online: http://camden.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/stream/ asset/?asset_id=2061682] Couch, S. 2012. Alexandra Road Park Conservation Management Plan [online: https://friendsofalexandraroadpark.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/arp_cmp_final_for_printing_july2012-smallest1.pdf] Hatherley, O. 2008. Militant Modernism. O Books/John Hunt Publishing

[online: https://friendsofalexandraroadpark.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/arp_cmp_final_for_printing_july2012-smallest1.pdf. Accessed November 2017] Historic England, 2017 – Listed Buildings of England [online: https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/listentry/1130403] Hughes, R. 2006 Paradise Now. The Guardian 20 March 2016 [ Online https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/ mar/20/architecture.modernism1] Accessed December 2017

Swenarton,M 2011 ‘Reforming the Welfare State: Camden 1965-73’, Footprint Journal (Delft Architecture Theory Journal), 9, Autumn 2011 Willat, S. 1996. Between Buildings and People. Academy Editions