Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978

Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978–1981

Swenarton, Mark

Designed in 1968–1969 by Neave Brown, Camden's Alexandra Road scheme in London is one of the most architecturally celebrated social housing schemes in Britain. But the project overran on both time and budget and before it was completed Camden's councillors launched a public enquiry (1978–1981) to find out what had gone wrong. Behind this lay much broader political changes, with radically different remedies to the economic crisis of the 1970s proposed by hard left and new right. Drawing on the unpublished papers of the enquiry and interviews with the key figures involved, including Neave Brown, Ken Livingstone and John Mills, the paper explores how this change of political alignments played out in the Alexandra Road public enquiry. It shows how the councillors struggled, in vain, to find evidence that the architect was to blame for the overruns; how an outside body, the National Building Agency, was brought in to pursue the investigation; and how successive attempts to identify a scapegoat (including an actionable report which had to be destroyed) proved unsuccessful. It shows how finally the enquiry was presented with an unpalatable discovery – that primary responsibility for what had happened lay not so much with the officers as with the councillors themselves.