Flats
Drawings of Highgate New Town
Overview
The following works are coloured pencil drawings depicting a series of fictionalised, dream-like scenes from around the Highgate New Town Estate in North London. Built by Camden Council in the 1970s and designed by Peter Tabori, it is the kind of social housing no longer made today. I lived on the estate through the pandemic and began making drawings of its public spaces.
I came to see the estate as a kind of theatre - cascading blocks, elevated walkways and long portals framing the spaces like stage sets, with inhabitants taking turns to be performer and audience.
I came to see the estate as a kind of theatre - cascading blocks, elevated walkways and long portals framing the spaces like stage sets, with inhabitants taking turns to be performer and audience.
Each drawing starts from a real location before being stripped back to its essential geometry and reorganised into new compositions through abstraction, exaggeration and distortion.
The deserted scenes are familiar, yet through hazy atmospheric colour and lighting feel like a memory, rather than an exact portrait. The emptiness creates a distance, both physically and emotionally, evoking a sense of loss. In this sense the series is simultaneously a tribute to an estate that continues to serve its residents today, and a memorial to the generosity that once guided urban housing provision in the UK.
The deserted scenes are familiar, yet through hazy atmospheric colour and lighting feel like a memory, rather than an exact portrait. The emptiness creates a distance, both physically and emotionally, evoking a sense of loss. In this sense the series is simultaneously a tribute to an estate that continues to serve its residents today, and a memorial to the generosity that once guided urban housing provision in the UK.
In Pairs
Streets no.1
Streets no.2 Facade of Infinity
Hard Edges Chamfers and Edges A Moment of Drama Streets in the Sky
Concrete Gorge Concrete Landscapes Fortress Stacks
Flats - Drawings of Highgate New Town
I had the pleasure of living on the modernist Highgate New Town Estate during the height of the Covid pandemic, while renting a small but gorgeous one-bedroom flat with my then-partner. As several lockdowns came and went, I could be found diligently working away as an architectural assistant at my tiny WFH station which comprised a desk propped against the bedroom window. It was an isolated but serene existence, insulated from the death and destruction the pandemic was causing for so many, none of which reached me directly. With socialising banned, I turned inwards and sank into a routine of morning walks and weekend gardening on the south-facing balcony - to be honest it was a blissful time. It was then that I started observing the estate more intimately, especially noticing the characteristics of the public spaces.
Having recently completed my MA in Architecture with a thesis project focusing on public performances, I was interested in the theatricality of the estate - there was so much drama! Sculptural cascading blocks of flats, elevated walkways, long portals and mysterious entry points. I had studied the sixteenth-century Roman city/theatre traditions and was seeing the characteristic devices everywhere - the exaggerated use of the linear perspective, proscenium framing, clearly defined areas for action in contrast with more shadowy pockets. I began seeing the estate as a place of theatre, a series of stages where the elaborate performance of our collective lives takes place.
Having recently completed my MA in Architecture with a thesis project focusing on public performances, I was interested in the theatricality of the estate - there was so much drama! Sculptural cascading blocks of flats, elevated walkways, long portals and mysterious entry points. I had studied the sixteenth-century Roman city/theatre traditions and was seeing the characteristic devices everywhere - the exaggerated use of the linear perspective, proscenium framing, clearly defined areas for action in contrast with more shadowy pockets. I began seeing the estate as a place of theatre, a series of stages where the elaborate performance of our collective lives takes place.
The Highgate New Town estate was built during the 70s, in what became known as the golden years for Camden Council’s social housing provision project. The architect, Peter Tabori, worked with modernist giants like Denys Lasdun and Neave Brown before joining Camden to deliver new housing. As wonderful as it was to live on such a well-known, well-kept and generally loved estate, finding out about its roots also made me deeply sad. I was renting privately from a colleague at the architecture firm where I worked. They owned two flats on the estate, ours and the one next door, where they lived as a family. Over the months I heard of or met at least five other wealthy architect families who bought flats on the estate. They form part of the 40% of the estate in private ownership, the remaining 60% being council flats. From what I gather a 60-40 ratio in favour of council ownership is pretty high, but still, all this user-focused consideration, the child-safe public spaces, the greenery, the thoughtful interior design touches, it was all reserved for a handful of (rich) people, alongside the deserving council tenants in need of housing. Some of the private owners even made a self-produced film with lots of reminiscences and heartwarming anecdotes about how lovely everything is on this magical estate. Although they were careful to interview a spectrum of tenants and owners, the tone felt rather smug. While the council tenants included stories about how they got to live on the estate, the owners listed off the estate’s charms with the price of entry entirely absent from the narrative. To be clear, I don’t begrudge any of those people the experience of living in such a wonderful place, but I was confronted with sadness and a growing sense of loss, knowing that this type of high quality housing is no more - Margaret Thatcher’s diabolical schemes had seen to that.
As I dwelled on this melancholy state of affairs I began drawing the moments around the estate I felt most intrigued by. I filled sketchbooks with quick observational sketches, identifying potential scenic moments to be worked up into detailed drawings in coloured pencil. Rather than simply illustrating the estate, I wanted to construct a fictionalised version of it. Using imagery borrowed from stage sets, I created flattened, scenic compositions. I stripped down the selected scenes to their essential geometry which was then transformed through abstraction - exaggerating a repeating motif, stretching a walkway, mirroring apartment units until they took on a new abstract meaning. I wanted these spaces to feel familiar yet dream-like, washed with peachy blush and rosy pink, hazy and slightly faded, like a memory rather than an exact portrait.
As the collection of drawings grew, three categories of interest emerged: urban relationship, layout and close ups. The scenes depicted in the drawings span these three scales or rather modes of interrogation.
As the collection of drawings grew, three categories of interest emerged: urban relationship, layout and close ups. The scenes depicted in the drawings span these three scales or rather modes of interrogation.
Urban relationship
Looking at the edges, where the estate meets the surrounding city, I came to view the place as a sort of autonomous body, a white sculptural alien that has landed on a raised platform in residential North London. Perhaps this is down to the extant estate being only phase one of further unrealised phases which would have interacted more with the raised levels, but as it is, the estate edges feel impenetrable and closed off - much like a theatre enclosed by unremarkable walls, housing the most spectacular drama within. When looking at the map, it is evident that the street network of the estate has been designed to seamlessly stitch into its surroundings - something that is far from evident when experienced on the ground. Inconspicuous entry points are concealed within the fortified walls, unannounced like stage doors, with a moat of thick shrubbery around much of the perimeter. The exterior gives away so little of the generous communal spaces just beyond the crenellation, which seemed to me a pity. Perhaps creating a safe haven is inherently isolationist, requiring boundaries to protect those within while excluding those outside.
Layout
The internal organisation of the estate layout was another lens for my sketching. Tabori followed the Neave Brown tradition of blurring the public/private line into a more porous arrangement, introducing semi-public and semi-private zones which set the scene for a wide range of social interactions. During my MA I researched performer/spectator relationships in which the traditional dynamics are subverted and I began seeing this at play in the architecture of the estate. The way the streets and walkways meet the private flats was of particular interest. Instead of a stark delineation, the divide is blurred and widened through paved passages, large concrete planters and utility areas, periodically punctuated by staircases. As a rule, every apartment’s front door is directly accessible from the street without a key or code via the external staircases. I examined the range of spaces while noting the type of interaction they facilitated: hurried nods of greeting in narrow alleys, hushed gossip in the semi-private shade of the open stairs, children performing complicated rollerskating tricks in the squares. Everyone on the estate taking turns to be performer and audience. Away from the danger and noise of traffic, people were able to make use of the public spaces - something that felt remarkable in today's London. For all the openness and connectivity, each flat is highly private. Thick concrete walls separate each bay from the next, creating a rhythmic facade of seemingly endless angled planes, suspended in rows like flats in a fly tower.
Close ups
The single most identifiable piece of geometry visible across the estate is the humble chamfer. The 45-degree angle slices down the edge of every balcony divider, walkway floor, concrete planter, metal handrail and even the tops of the bin stores at the foot of each cluster of flats. The estate was designed in the Gesamtkunstwerk tradition of totality - a word Wagner coined for the opera house - applied here across every surface. The chamfered geometry even inspired a resident to make little seats to use on the low walls around the estate, handy for parents watching their children from the edge of the playground. The simple constructions used a wooden wedge, the exact inverse of the chamfer, that hooked over the angle and created a level surface. The chamfer became a core part of the drawing series, both as a ubiquitous motif and in its stretched and abstracted form as a compositional tool.
The estate was built with inexpensive materials like breeze blocks and exposed concrete, and yet formal order underpins every corner. Clearly in lieu of a large budget attention and care went where it costs nothing: the geometry.
Drawing is a meditative, deeply personal practice for me. Something magical happens when paper and mind are connected through the devices of pencil and hand. Intentions and plans can be set, but inevitably some unpredictable ideas emerge. A key question in this series is: what can drawings tell us about places that a photograph can’t? As I was drawing these pieces I thought of all the vastly different lives that the estate provides a backdrop to, and the relationships we all form with the place. I knew my time there was temporary, defined by the terms of a tenancy agreement. Still, the estate became my home in a very solid and permanent way. Although I purposely didn’t draw people in the scenes, themes of belonging, attachment and memory are at the core of the series, implied by the spatial compositions, the lighting, the dreamy colours. The scenes are slightly faded and largely deserted, creating distance, both in a physical and an experiential sense, and evoking a feeling of loss for a type of housing no longer built. The series is both a tribute to a housing estate that continues to serve its inhabitants and a memorial to the generosity that once guided the provision of public housing.