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Evonne Jiawei Yuan

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The Brunswick (Centre), Bloomsbury, London

The Brunswick Centre in the 70s

The Brunswick Centre, originally named as the Foundling Estate, is a building-city complex for both residential and commercial uses in Bloomsbury, Camden, London, England, situating itself between Brunswick Square and Russell Square. Designed by Patrick Hodgkinson that based on a substantial study by Leslie Martin who was an advocate of the garden city movement, it was accomplished during the late 60s and the early 70s to fulfill the local planning policy, whose aim was to promote buildings that could be able to support family life and to counter the situation that the vernacular fabric of small-scale Georgian terraces and squares were being largely institutionalised by huge building blocks including colleges, offices, hotels and student hostels, also the west side of the estate was in severely disordered conditions because of a number of shanty food processing stores like butchers and donkeys.

Therefore, Hodgkinson’s scheme for the Brunswick Centre was primarily driven by the concept of low-rise, high-density residential development which could possibly accommodate hundreds of families, which should retain the traditional Bloomsbury scale. The Brunswick Centre finally appears to be a couple of two parallel housing blocks of tiered flats facing each other across a shopping area slightly elevated above the ground level on one end, underneath which is a double layer of parking area and service

Evonne Jiawei Yuan

Description II

access. About 16 different housing types encompassed in the housing blocks from luxury, professional to hostel uses for the residents formed a mixed village in the central area of London. Meanwhile, the residents are able to access the two housing blocks via both the shopping area and the entrances from the street which break into the massive façades and integrate the three sides of the construction into a permeable piece. Interestingly, Hodgkinson was trained as an architect under Corbusien principles though, the scheme he adopted for the Brunswick Centre embedded itself in the traditional notion of the organisation of a college in Oxford or Cambridge that the tranquil domestic life within the construction formed by linear buildings with external staircases and internal voids could somewhat function as a grand medieval house or monastery but opposed to the growing urban densities.

Consequently, the construction was undertaken completely different from the rhetorical modern model of reinforced concrete megastructure. What was applied instead was to incorporate a brick-built architecture that worked as a better demonstration of enclosure and a counter-argumentation of the canonical modernist approach, but still capable of meeting the societal needs. However, the developer was not satisfied in paying for the whole overlay of bricks for the buildings according to Hodgkinson’s first proposal. Thus the architect subsequently modified the scheme that the slightly elevated floorplate surrounded by continuous linear blocks with less points of vertical access but horizontal internal access galleries, which was essentially its final appearance today. The elevated floorplate also credited the construction with a more civic status to be relatively more domestic in terms of scale beside the street. During the 50s and 60s, there witnessed a heated debate whether the traditional models of the home, either at the intellectual level or in the populist sense, was still practicable, but the general public was quite prepared to consider the modernist ideas of domestic lives. The Brunswick Centre turned out to be a negotiation between both. Above all, in the post-war England, it formed a good concrete example of engaging oneself more with his existential awareness in the society and transcending the mundaneness of his surrounding environs. Now referring to itself as The Brunswick, it contains more than 500 flats, a number of shops, cafÊs and restaurants, a large supermarket and a cinema.

Reference: Melhuish, Clare. The Life & Times of The Brunswick, Bloomsbury. London: Camden History Society, 2006.