High Density without High Rise: Housing Experiments of the 1950s by Patrick Hodgkinson

In the 30 years following the end of the Second World War, of the nine million new dwellings built in Great Britain the state, in the form of local authorities, was responsible for constructing just over half.1 In terms of their architectural character, for the first half of the period the dominant model was ‘mixed development’, in which high blocks containing flats were combined with low-rise (usually four-storey) buildings containing maisonettes (two-storey units). But in the 1960s mixed development came in for increasing criticism and gave way to a new format, high-density low-rise, as most famously developed by Neave Brown and others at the London Borough of Camden after 1965, which provided similar densities without building high.2