Delivering a Vision for Infill Development

Maitland Park Estate was built in the 1930s with successive waves of development until the 1980s. Set around a long park, it provides a tranquil and mature landscape at its heart.

At Grafton Terrace, the scheme repairs the Victorian street frontage with a combination of four to six storey flats and a standalone four-storey townhouse. A new community hall houses a large, sub-dividable function room, and bookable meeting/teaching spaces at its heart to provide a hub for locals. New boundary treatments to back gardens, new play features, landscape enhancements and planting have greatly improved the estate’s parkland setting.

On the Aspen House site, a five-storey courtyard building is fronted with a six-storey mansion block to the park. The communal courtyard is landscaped with blossoming trees and areas to sit and play, for the benefit of all the residents of the estate. This building, Anthony Grey Court, replaced an ageing and poorly-laid-out block with 52 modern affordable homes.

Maitland Park is the first project for Camden to target the Homes Quality Mark (HQM) accreditation, ensuring each home achieves an excellent standard of performance while being made of healthy, low-carbon materials. The project is also the first Camden Borough scheme to use air-source heat pumps with MVHR (so fully electric), combining with an extensive PV array, a building fabric based on Passivhaus principles, and biodiverse roofs to achieve a truly low energy scheme.

Project Timeline

2012: Camden's Community Investment Programme (CIP) began exploring options to undertake infill development.
2015: First of a series of planning consents granted, concluding in a Minor Material Amendment, (MMA) in 2019.
2016 – 2019: Decanting and leasehold buy back of 39 unit block (Aspen House).
2020: Contractor working on two stage tender, began demolition of Aspen House, Tenants and Residents' Hall and gymnasium.
2022 – 2023: 119 homes (58 private sale, 61 social rent) and a community centre built and handed over in stages since December 2022.
2023: All homes sold via Help to Buy handed over and completed by March 2023, with the entire project completing in July.

Building Community Strength and Driving Change

Camden is committed to addressing inequalities, building community strength, and increasing diversity and inclusion. Across the Community Investment Programme, Camden has been consulting with residents to commemorate pioneering individuals from communities that have historically been under-represented in the public realm. At Maitland Park, residents chose to name the three new buildings after the following inspiring individuals:

• Antony Grey, an LGBTQ+ rights activist, lobbyist, writer, media campaigner, and counsellor. He is seen by many as the most important British gay rights campaigner of the 20th century. He lived in Camden in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Mary Prince, the first Black woman to have an autobiography published in Britain. It is the only known autobiographical account of a female slave from the Caribbean.
• Noor Inayat Khan, the first woman spy to be dropped behind enemy lines in occupied France during the Second World War.

Courtyards and Streets

The Maitland Park community is proud of the wonderful ‘central park’ that makes their estate unique, with its superb mix of mature trees creating a tranquil atmosphere. Following extensive community involvement, changes were made to the scheme at each stage of the consultation process to ensure the views of tenants and neighbours were fully considered and addressed. The redevelopment focused on two key sites each with their own design considerations to resolve. Site 1 (Grafton Terrace), consisted of the original TRA Hall with adjacent garages - this now houses Mary Prince House and the new Community Hall. Site 2 (Aspen House), contained Aspen House, the Gymnasium, and the adjacent garages - this now comprises of Noor Inayat Khan House and Antony Grey Court.

Mary Prince House

• Repairs the street and continues the building line.
• Creates a new gateway to arrival from the north - creates a Landmark Building.
• Creates a hub for the community - reorientating the entrance for the TRA Hall to the corner with its own garden.
• Enjoys the relationship to the open space of the ‘Glade’.
• Provides a mix of houses and apartments with private gardens.
• Reduces the impact of building height to the ‘Glade’ on the corner of Grafton Terrace.
• Resolves overlooking issues to existing rear gardens.
• Creates an enhanced landscape to the Glade, including repairs to boundary walls, paths and lighting.
• Relocates the existing football pitch to be a MUGA that is secure and well overlooked.

Noor Inayat Khan House and Antony Grey Court

• Creates a new courtyard addressing the park similar to the urban pattern set by the Alms Houses and St Dominic’s Priory immediately north of the site.
• Creates a new housing block, (Noor Inayat Khan House), which addresses the open park and reinforces the street edge and scale of the adjacent park edge buildings.
• Creates additional outdoor space with more potential for a sense of ownership with individual gardens up to the boundary.
• Creates an opportunity for greater permeability through the scheme to ensure safety and security.

Maitland Park Estate Community Centre

The community hall has over 3,500 square foot of flexible space featuring:

• a cafe-style dining area with a domestic kitchen and office/reception space with storage.
• a large hall (1,180 sq. ft) that can be sub-divided into two studio spaces, each with generous, lockable, storage space allowing occupiers to store large belongings.
• a separate space with an additional two meeting rooms: one large meeting room with a kitchenette/ tea point, and one small meeting room and a toilet.
• central hallway/corridor space with a further four toilets (two wheelchair accessible).
• an external community garden.

A Shared Palette of Materials

The forms and materials across the three new buildings share a common palette to create a sense of cohesion to the development.

In keeping with the neighbourhood, a brick made of pale clay, to give a light cream appearance, is used with flush pointed pale grey mortar. To the façades addressing the courtyard to Antony Grey Court, the pale brick maximises the amount of light reflected within the space.

Basketweave brick panels occur within the rhythm of the façade, bounded top and bottom by white concrete framing elements, (sills and heads), to contrast with the main body of the brickwork.

A dark brick base, with a dark grey mortar, grounds the buildings and deals with knocks, scuffs and dirt. The same bricks are used in landscape boundary walls and garden terraces as pavers to unify the project.

Top floors throughout are in a pre-oxidised copper coloured metal cladding. The same material is used to clad balconies within Antony Grey Court, embossed with a pattern that reflects the basketweave motif used in the brickwork.

Windows and doors have metal frames externally and a timber finish internally. The colour of the frames and associated spandrel panels complement the metal cladding colour and brick using a dark grey finish.

Winter gardens to Grafton Terrace use sliding single glazed windows, to allow the gardens to open up when desired.

Protruding brick balconies have horizontally arranged, painted steel balustrades to minimise any obstruction of view from within the flats. They are painted to match the colour of the windows.

Community Investment Programme

Camden has bold and ambitious targets for housing delivery, with 4850 new homes to be built throughout the lifetime of the Community Investment Programme (CIP). Through CIP the council has now delivered over 2,000 new homes, more than 1,290 of which are genuinely affordable.

Camden has been at the forefront of the council house building renaissance since 2010, using years of experience to strengthen and build resilience in the face of severe economic challenges.
Camden Council remains fully committed to delivering on our ambitious programme target of delivering over 2,600 affordable homes.

CIP is one of the Council’s most significant levers for tackling inequality and improving lives in the borough.

As part of social value commitments, the following was achieved during the redevelopment of the Maitland Park Estate:
• Recruitment of 7 apprentices.
• Work experience 16+ for 8 students.
• Graduate recruited on the project.
• A number of school/curriculum-based activities/ College site visits were carried out.
• School/College Site workshops.
• Community event days.
• Donations.