Maiden Lane Estate
Just next to the shiny redevelopment of King's Cross, across the railway line, sits the Maiden Lane estate. I read about it online and decided to visit with my camera on one of the first warm April evenings.
Maiden Lane is a low-rise, high-density council estate in north London, between Camden Town and King's Cross, designed by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth for the London Borough of Camden and built between 1976 and 1982.
Benson and Forsyth had already tested their ideas at Branch Hill in Hampstead (gallery coming soon), and Maiden Lane was meant to be the larger, more ambitious version of the same approach: curved stair towers and raised walkways, with the blocks gathered around named courts. Cars were kept to the edges, so the heart of the estate belongs to people on foot.
The same unfortunate pattern seen across many council estates repeated itself here in the 1980s: the planning was very well crafted, but construction faults, damp and neglect gave it a hard reputation, and parts were later refurbished.
Things must have improved a lot since then, and walking through it now you feel that both stories are still there. The dialogue between the architecture and everyday life is far from smooth, but the original vision still seems to hold, here and there.
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