In trying to find out more about the work of William Barnes as Director of Housing at Camden from 1 January 1971 (I learned the date from a booklet he produced about his work called A Londoner’s Lot), I bought a copy of Mark Swenarton’s incredibly impressive Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. I discovered nothing about Barnes who is not even listed in the index, but a great deal about Neave Brown, including the fact that, although an American, he was educated at Marlborough before being encouraged by Bill Howell, a fellow old Marlburian, to study at the AA; and that he himself lived in his first group of houses in Winscombe Road, which he designed in private practice, and that the other residents (there were only five houses and a communal garden) included Ed and Beattie Jones and Michael and Patty Hopkins – an architects’ utopia.
What an amazing cluster !