The Alexandra Road estate (officially the Alexandra and Ainsworth estate, but often referred to as Rowley Way) is a housing estate in the London Borough of Camden, North West London, England. Alexandra Road estate was designed in a brutalist architecture style in 1968 by Neave Brown of Camden Council's Architects Department. Alexandra Road estate construction work commenced in 1972 and was completed in 1978. Alexandra Road estate is constructed from site-cast, board-marked white, unpainted reinforced concrete. Along with 520 apartments, the Alexandra Road estate also includes a school, community centre, youth club, heating complex, and parkland.
The Alexandra Road estate consists of three parallel east-west blocks, and occupies a crescent-shaped site bounded on the south by Boundary Road, Loudoun Road on the east, Abbey Road on the west, and by the West Coast Main Line to the north. The desire to control the sound and vibration from passing trains was a major consideration in the layout of the estate. Two rows of terraced apartments are aligned along the tracks. The higher, eight-story block directly adjacent to the railway line is organised in the form of a ziggurat, and acts as a noise barrier that blocks the noise of the trains from reaching the interior portion of the Alexandra Road estate, and its foundations rest on rubber pads that eliminate vibration. A lower, four-storey block runs along the other side of a continuous pedestrian walkway, known as Rowley Way, serving both terraced rows of buildings. The third row of buildings, along the southern edge of the site, parallels another public walkway, Langtry Walk, between this row and the existing earlier buildings of the Ainsworth Estate and defines a public park with play areas between the second and third row of dwellings.
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Alexandra Road Estate has suffered less vandalism than many Camden estates, and it was granted Grade II* listed status on August 1993, the first post-war council housing estate to be 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."
After a continuing career including international town planning and post-graduate teaching, Brown retrained as a fine artist, to which occupation he devoted his retirement. In October 2017, Brown won the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Brown died, aged 88, in January 2018.
Brutalist architecture is an architectural style which emerged during the 1950s in the United Kingdom, among the reconstruction projects of the post-war era. Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design. The Brutalist architecture style commonly makes use of exposed, unpainted concrete or brick, angular geometric shapes and a predominantly monochrome colour palette; other materials, such as steel, timber, and glass, are also featured.
Descending from the modernist movement, Brutalism architecture is said to be a reaction against the nostalgia of architecture in the 1940s. Derived from the Swedish phrase nybrutalism, the term "New Brutalism" was first used by British architects Alison and Peter Smithson for their pioneering approach to design. The Brutalist architecture style was further popularised in a 1955 essay by architectural critic Reyner Banham, who also associated the movement with the French phrases béton brut ("raw concrete") and art brut ("raw art"). The Brutalist architecture style, as developed by architects such as the Smithsons, Hungarian-born Ernő Goldfinger, and the British firm Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, was partly foreshadowed by the modernist work of other architects such as French-Swiss Le Corbusier, Estonian-American Louis Kahn, German-American Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Finnish Alvar Aalto.
In the United Kingdom, Brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions across the world. Brutalist designs became most commonly used in the design of institutional buildings, such as universities, libraries, courts and city halls. The popularity of the Brutalist movement began to decline in the late 1970s, with some associating the style with urban decay and totalitarianism.
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