Branch Hill Estate

Branch Hill Estate is a development of twenty-one semi-detached houses built between 1974 and 1976 by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth of the London Borough of Camden's Architects' Department. The estate has undergone minor later alterations.

Planning and Layout

The houses are arranged in three rows that step down the slope of Branch Hill. The development consists of two blocks: one three houses wide positioned lower down the hill, and another four houses wide set higher up. These blocks are connected by an orthogonal grid of brick-paved pedestrian passageways that governs the entire estate's planning. Parking is provided in a row of garages built into the hillside at the top of the slope. The estate contains two house types: four-bedroom properties occupy the first row at the top of the slope, whilst two rows of three-bedroom houses sit below.

Construction and Materials

The houses have a reinforced concrete frame with reinforced concrete roof slabs and beams. The walls are rendered block cavity construction with load-bearing inner skins.

Exterior Character

The design is thoroughly modern in its materials, detailing and overall form. Bright white, smooth-finished concrete contrasts dramatically with dark-stained timber frames and the grey concrete exposed faces of the structural beams and slabs. The concrete surfaces bear rough-sawn board-marks and chamfers, finishes that are also used for the gangway slabs and the courtyard and terrace walls. The board-marks follow a logical pattern: horizontal for the slabs and vertical for the walls, adding texture to the elevations, whilst the chamfers define the edges.

The living rooms are fully glazed on one side. The return elevations feature long horizontal windows positioned high up for privacy, with some wrapping around corners. The rear elevation of the four-bedroom houses displays an arrangement of two rows of wide windows, with some taller casements on the upper storey and wrap-around corners on the lower level. This arrangement is a hallmark of the Camden Architects' Department style, also seen at Dunboyne Road. This forms the first view visitors encounter when entering from Spendan Close and establishes motifs used throughout the estate, such as the stepped profile of the blocks with their projecting upper storeys.

The whole estate is governed by the strict geometry of the orthogonal plan, which permits little variety of perspective, although the slipped grid to the north of the site interrupts the regularity slightly and the abundant greenery of the garden terraces softens its effect. The brick paving of the paths is highly characterful.

Each house has a garden terrace on the roof of the house immediately below it on the slope. These terraces are accessed from the living room's French door via a gangway over the horizontal passageways and courtyard. An outdoor metal spiral staircase in the courtyard provides additional access to the gangway and thus to the garden terrace and living room. Each terrace has topsoil allowing residents to plant a garden, utilising the full load-bearing capacities of the reinforced concrete roof slabs. Window boxes are incorporated into the roof slabs along the front of each living room window. Only the bottom row of houses has ground-level gardens. The garden terraces project slightly from the storey below, creating privacy for the living room of the property beneath. Concrete walls further shield the more exposed corners of the terraces.

Interior Arrangement

The interiors were not inspected, but much can be understood from contemporary accounts of the estate. All front doors open onto the vertical passageways, which are paved in red brick.

In the three-bedroom houses, the front door leads to the kitchen and dining room area on a split level, with steps descending to the bedrooms (which open onto a small courtyard) or ascending to the living room and master bedroom. The living room and master bedroom cantilever slightly above the bedrooms to take advantage of natural light and views.

The four-bedroom houses follow roughly the same arrangement, but because they occupy the first row, an extra storey can be included above the kitchen and dining room where the other rows have the next layer's garden terrace. The absence of the terrace permits a large west-facing clerestory that brings light into the double-height kitchen and dining area, and the living room is also larger.

In each house, the kitchen counter was a permanent tiled concrete shelf, and these are likely to have been retained. Originally there would also have been storey-height doors, sliding partitions between rooms, built-in cupboards and shelves, and chipboard and softwood purpose-crafted staircases. Interior fittings designed by Camden Architects' Department were always of good quality. All the window joinery survives but some front doors have been replaced.

Subsidiary Features

The hard surfaces are also of special interest, including the brick and concrete pathways and entrance drive, and a row of concrete garages with semi-circular-headed ventilation shafts at the northern edge of the estate. The garage's cantilevered roof slab is in board-marked concrete and extends to form a boundary wall to the drive where the slope of the hill steepens. These features are included in the listing.

Historical Context

In 1965, Camden purchased an Edwardian mansion, Branch Hill Lodge, and its four-plus acre grounds. The mansion was converted into an old people's home, whilst the grounds were allocated for social housing despite local protests 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 developing only the house's former lawn and gardens, just over half the plot's acreage.

The Department's preference for high-density, low-rise housing suited the limited site perfectly. The site was also governed by a covenant stipulating that 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 four-bedroom, twenty-eight three-bedroom) that respected these restrictions whilst maintaining Parker Morris standards of room size and storage capacity. Each house also had a small yard and a rooftop garden.

Essentially, the model was terraced houses, as Neave Brown had adopted on early estates, but with narrow walkways 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 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. The flat roof of each house forms the roof terrace of the next house up the slope, so that from above the estate appears as terraced gardens, not too different from 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.

Costs and Controversy

Whilst the design met the brief architecturally, it proved disastrous in terms of cost. The land had been purchased at a high price (£464,000 in 1965) and construction costs escalated in the difficult economic climate of the 1970s. The land, built on spoil from the construction of the Northern Line in the early 1900s, required a modified piling system mid-construction. When 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 was the most scathing, writing: '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'.

Critical Reception

Knight's vitriol in the Architects Journal about the politics of Branch Hill extended only in part to criticism of the architecture. His tone was more equivocal, commenting on but not condemning the estate's old-fashioned style: "window walls, raw concrete, split levels and roof terraces take one back a long way further in psychological distance than the current neo-vernacular: Brave New World in contrast to Loss of Nerve. Branch Hill defies all the rules now laid down by Camden for its housing but it does attempt to make architecture out of the dreary bureaucratic provisions for human life in the 1970s".

In Knight's article and another by Jos Boys in The Architect, the estate received some criticism: the grid plan lacked variety and the latitudinal passageways were bleak; the estate ignored its surroundings; some elements of the plans within the houses were unhelpful, for example each bedroom courtyard was too far away from the living areas for infants to play there without parental supervision and too small to be useful. Yet in both critical appraisals, the interiors received praise: Knight described them as 'positive, interesting and generous in spirit'; Boys thought 'the inside of any house at Branch Hill is a real treat'.

Elsewhere, the response was more glowing. Building Design considered that 'the sloping site has been used to great advantage by the architects who have produced a scheme of great sophistication and pleasantness'. The Architects Journal noted: 'Camden have arguably succeeded in building some of the highest quality council accommodation in the country'. Official Architecture and Planning praised the idealism of the architects: 'I suspect lesser or wiser designers would not have got this far ... a matter for reflection for all those that want to do the thing that is right rather than what the unthinking system tells them to do'.

The estate received some international attention, an Italian journal arguing that 'design by Benson and Forsyth is undoubtedly a noteworthy one that indicates the high professional standard of English architects expressed in the technical accomplishment of the detailing'. Aside from the notoriety of the politics and the cost, the response to Branch Hill was broadly positive. Criticism of the architecture, mostly concerning the orthogonal plan and the arrangement of some rooms and outdoor spaces, appeared only in the more thorough appraisals where more detailed commentary was given.

Camden Architects' Department Context

The 1960s and 1970s Camden Architects' Department is renowned for its bold and innovative approach to public housing design. The Borough Architect, Sydney Cook, refused to build high-rise tower blocks favoured by other local authorities—not a single one was built during his tenure—and shunned standardised plans and industrial building techniques. Instead, Cook favoured low-rise, high-density housing and a distinct 'Camden style' emerged from the office, inspired by the architecture of Denys Lasdun and Patrick Hodgkinson at Brunswick Square, with whom Cook worked when the housing there passed to Camden in 1965.

Branch Hill is one of the best examples of this style. Other schemes by the Department include Alexandra Road (Neave Brown, 1973-8, Grade II*), Maiden Lane (Benson and Forsyth, 1979-82, unlisted) and Dunboyne Road (Neave Brown, 1966-9, unlisted).

Reasons for Listing

Branch Hill Estate is listed at Grade II for its special architectural interest as a bold, modernist design of 1970 by Benson and Forsyth; for its complex stepped-section, which works brilliantly on a sloping site governed by strict covenants; for its sophisticated use of materials, where the smooth-finished, white concrete contrasts with the dark-stained joinery and exposed structural skeleton, the latter immaculately detailed with board-marking and chamfering; and as one of the best estates designed by Camden Architects' Department, pioneers of low-rise, high-density housing in the 1960s and 1970s.