This purist exercise for Camden by Benson and Forsyth is council housing but because of its high quality and sought-after location, Branch Hill Estate could easily be taken for an up-market private development. There are 42 properties in total and they are all semi-detached. The houses are arranged in three rows and are set close together along the steeply sloping site. The flat rows of one row becoming the gardens for the row above. There is one block of housing that is three houses wide set further down the hill from the other, which are four houses wide.
The underground car park really takes you back to the 70s, especially as we saw a newly restored vintage car parked inside. The whole plan of the estate is rigid and dense with narrow flights of steps threaded through the complex cubic forms. I must say the steps are too steep for my small stature to climb! Inside the planning is unconventional and the high cost of the scheme has made this the most expensive council housing in the country. Today, these homes are grade II listed (including the car vents too!) and cost around £1 million.
In 1965, Camden had purchased an Edwardian mansion, Branch Hill Lodge, and its four plus acre grounds. The former was converted into an old people's home; the latter allocated for social housing, despite protestation from locals about building on undeveloped land. Benson and Forsyth, protégés of the Architects' Department's Neave Brown, received the commission in 1970 and decided to retain the mature wooded areas of the grounds by only developing the house's former lawn and gardens, just over half the acreage of the plot. The Department's preference for high-density, low-rise housing was perfectly suited to the limited site, which was also governed by a covenant that stipulated new buildings must be semi-detached and of no more than two storeys. Benson and Forsyth designed a clever scheme of forty-two houses (fourteen 4-bedroom, twenty-eight 3-bedroom) that respected these restrictions but maintained Parker Morris standards of room size and storage capacity. Each house also had a small yard and a roof top garden. Essentially, the model was terraces of houses, as Neave Brown had adopted on early estates, but with narrow walkways in between pairs so that the scheme qualified as semi-detached. In Brown's schemes at Dunboyne Road and Alexandra Road, each floor is stepped back and the living areas placed above the bedrooms so that they open out onto a private balcony and take advantage of extra light. A similar concept is used at Branch Hill, with even greater utility and effect given the sloping topography of the site. The flat roof of each house is the roof terrace of the next house up the slope, such that from above the estate appears as terraced gardens, not too different to the Edwardian gardens they replaced. The density of a multi-storey block was achieved, but the stepped-section plan fulfilled the covenant's requirement for low-storey, semi-detached houses without adopting the suburban layout that such a stipulation would appear to demand. Yet while the design met the brief architecturally, it was a disaster in terms of cost. The land had been purchased at a high price (£464,000 in 1965) and costs of construction escalated in the difficult economic climate of the 1970s. The houses were built on spoil from the construction of the Northern Line in the early 1900s which turned out to require a modified piling system mid-construction. When the new residents finally arrived in 1978, the cost was calculated as over £72,000 per dwelling. By this time, the idealism of the post-war welfare state was on the wane and the reaction against state spending of the Thatcher years was close at hand; the estate, dubbed 'California beach style' by the Evening Standard, attracted negative press coverage. Architectural critic Christopher Knight in the Architects Journal (AJ) was the most scathing. He wrote: 'this bright young architect's vision realised is now notorious and a favourite target for politicians and furious ratepayers ... conceived as a social time-bomb it is an economic nonsense ... it is financially irresponsible, a slap in the eye to the affluent neighbours whose view has been transformed'.
