Alexandra Road Case Study

How had this come about? With 520 dwellings, Alexandra Road was by no means the largest of the social housing projects constructed in the 1970s; other local authorities built housing schemes that contained a lot more dwellings.8 Nor was Alexandra Road the only one which took much longer to build, and cost far more, than originally projected; its near-contemporary, Kensington and Chelsea’s World’s End estate (1969–1977), took eight years to build and cost £15 million instead of the original tender price of £5.6 million.9 Nor was Alexandra Road an unpopular estate that the council found difficult to fill: on the contrary, despite well-documented problems with the heating, the flats at Alexandra Road ‘were probably the easiest ever to let’, according to Camden’s housing department at the time.10 Nor unlike some housing projects of the 1970s, particularly those built with industrialized systems, was Alexandra Road to end up being demolished at huge cost to the council and ratepayers.

Why then was Alexandra Road the only one subjected to a public enquiry?

The answer is to be found in the politics of social architecture and the politics of London, as they played out in Camden at the key historical juncture of the late 1970s. Why did Camden’s councillors set up a public enquiry? Why was there such apparent unanimity across the political spectrum – from the Conservative opposition to the ‘old guard’ Labour leadership to the new ‘hard left’ led by Ken Livingstone – over the issue and what did the various parties and factions hope to achieve from the enquiry? Was the enquiry, as the councillors claimed, a dispassionate investi- gation or, as many of those at the receiving end of its questioning felt, a kangaroo court? What did the enquiry find out and to what extent did those findings accord with the aims of the various parties

involved?
This article seeks to answer these questions. To do so it will look first at the politics of London, and Camden specifically, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Figure 3) – the time when the Labour party, particularly in London, was fracturing under the impact of the cuts in welfare spending imposed first by the Labour and then by the Conservative government. It will then review the construction history of Alexandra Road, from its approval by the housing committee in 1969 through the letting of the contract in 1971 and the various vicissi- tudes that ensued before completion in 1979. It will then focus in on the May 1978 election cam- paign in Camden, in which the mushrooming cost of Alexandra Road was a major issue, and the decision taken soon after to set up the public enquiry. It will then look at the enquiry and the decision to bring in the National Building Agency (NBA), tracing how the search for a single culprit – be it the officers or the various consultants – was frustrated at every turn and how, in the end, the enquiry came to a conclusion that was deeply uncomfortable to those who had instigated it. Finally, it will look at what happened when the report was finally published in 1981, before drawing some general conclusions from the entire episode.