Middlesex Street Estate

Middlesex Street estate was built between 1965 and 1970 for the Corporation of London and designed by its Department of Architecture and Planning under City Architect E.G. Chandler. It is composed from the 23 storey Petticoat Tower and an elevated inner courtyard surrounded by deck access housing. Drawing on the precedent of dense inner city schemes with aerial pedestrian landscapes like the Barbican, the estate was connected to the ad-hoc London Pedway, although all links are now severed due to surrounding development. This architects of the municipal enterprise had to be creative with their budgets and used ABBA stacking on the balconies to achieve variation in the façade. Other choices in terms of massing, cantilevered escape stairs, set-backs and protrusions of the variously concrete and engineering brick construction made the most of limited finance. The scheme was not a favourite of Pevsner’s, who labelled it as ‘very hard and very urban, even by the standards of the time. Aggressive six-storey outer ranges of partially stepped section in black engineering brick, their dominant motif fiddly slotted concrete balconies’ [1].

[1] Pevsner, N., Bradley, S. & Cherry, B. (1997) London: The City of London (London: Penguin) p.556.