Cook's Camden

The housing projects built in Camden in the 1960s and 1970s when Sydney Cook was borough architect are widely regarded as the most important urban housing built in the UK in the past 100 years. The schemes - which included Alexandra Road, Branch Hill, Fleet Road, Highgate New Town and Maiden Lane - set out a model of street-based housing that continues to command interest and admiration from architects to this day. Cook recruited some of the brightest talent available in London at the time, including Neave Brown, Benson & Forsyth and Peter Tabori, and also commissioned up-and-coming practices such as Colquhoun & Miller, Edward Cullinan and Farrell Grimshaw. 00The Camden projects represented a new type of urban housing based on a return to streets with front doors. In place of tower blocks, the Camden architects showed how the required densities could be achieved without building high, creating a new kind of urbanism that integrated with, rather than broke from, its cultural and physical context.