11. Alton East and West Estates

30 November 2021

Portsmouth Road (now Alton East) and Roehampton Lane (Alton West) were the best sites left within the old county of London for post-war housing.  The London County Council, under pressure from within and without, formed a new Housing Division in its Architect’s Department specially to develop them, and the architects also took responsibility for the landscaping.  The two estates by two rival teams in the LCC Housing Division, are very different in style: the architects of Alton East had made extensive visits to Sweden, which inspired the form of the tower blocks, their layout and setting.  By contrast Alton West retained and transformed the remains of a landscape by Capability Brown and superimposed a more formal architecture.

Elain Harwood is a senior architectural investigator with Historic England and undertook the research that underpinned the post-war landscape designations added to the Gardens Register in 2020.  She is the author of Space, Hope and Brutalism (Yale 2015) and has written extensively on the work of the London County Council and its architects.