Camden, one of the 32 boroughs making up Greater London, lies just northwest of the city’s center. It is famed in British architecture for a very high standard of public-housing projects of a unique kind, designed and built in the 1960s and ’70s. The borough architect was Sydney Cook (1910–79), whose great achievement at the very end of his career was to reject tower blocks in favor of low-rise high-density developments, and to assemble a team of ambitious young architects to design them.
What Cook reestablished during his eight-year tenure from 1965 to ’73 was the London tradition of a front door onto a street. Whereas in the past this had meant conventional row housing, the Camden architects experimented with a variety of newer forms. One of these was the “stepped section,” whereby each floor was set back from the one below, allowing garden terraces and walkways. In this manner, even upper-floor apartments were connected to the public realm.
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