Brixton Belle

The truth is coming!" And it's coming live via video link, according to the poster advertising a talk by American civil rights campaigner Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan's face, posted proudly on the inside of a window, is the most animated thing about this block in what's left of the original Angell Town estate in Brixton, south London. Most of the other windows are boarded up and it's the same story in the adjacent block.

Across the street, however, where only a few years ago the blocks faced their mirror image, there sits a pristine development of modern mews houses. You could be forgiven for taking the contemporary style as evidence of a yuppie invasion, but this is in fact the new face of the Angell Town estate. Once a notorious grid of deck-access blocks, the estate has been redesigned by architect Burrell Foley Fischer to give it a brighter, more human character.

"What characterised the estate," says partner Stephanie Fischer, was that it was very institutional; it was represented in the A-Z as a blob because there wasn't really a street pattern. We wanted to reestablish a pattern of streets and mews and links to surrounding routes."

The redesign, the second phase of which was completed at the end of 2002, is the culmination of more than a decade of community action. The original Angell Town estate, completed in the early 1970s, had never been popular with its residents. Built at odds with the local street pattern, the estate was cut off from the surrounding community. On top of this, there were no homes at street level, which were occupied instead by gloomy parking enclosures under the housing blocks. Unsurprisingly, the estate became seen as a no-go area.

Power to the people
The residents launched a vociferous campaign for the regeneration of Angell Town, and they set their aspirations high. When Lambeth council called in Burrell Foley Fischer in 1998, the architects at the firm showed residents a range of models to choose from. The one that emerged as the most popular was a light, low-rise design that mixed references to terraced housing and contemporary detailing. In other words, the antithesis of the featureless horizontal blocks they had known.

In the five-storey deck-access blocks, one home was indistinguishable from another and visitors were hard-pressed to find their way around. In the new three-storey design, differentiated windows and balconies give each floor an individual character. Furthermore, no space is wasted on anonymous public areas. Generally, there are only two flats to a street-level door and every household has some private outdoor space, whether a balcony, patio or small garden. The overall effect is closer to the villa architecture found in the rest of Brixton than to your average housing estate.

At the heart of the design was a traditional material that was associated with housing on a more personal scale: brick. But the architect steered clear of Victorian or 1960s reds and opted for a sandstone-coloured variety to create light, modern facades. These are animated with other materials more common to upmarket commercial developments, such as glass bricks and wooden slats. But, as Fischer makes clear, "the residents weren't just involved in the window dressing, but in the fundamental principles".

The architect chose a pale brick called Throckley Smooth Buffs, made by Ibstock, to create a brighter environment for residents. For a smooth finish it also chose a mortar, made by RMC, that was as close to the colour of the bricks as possible. This way, the facades read as a fairly seamless masonry plane rather than as a disjointed surface with thousands of components.

The design of the facades has been carefully worked out to avoid as far as possible the need for cut bricks. Balconies and windows are carefully aligned with the brickwork so that there is a crisp symmetrical relationship between the components of the design and its essential material.

Steering clear of the uniformity that plagued the original estate, the architect avoided large fields of brickwork, breaking up the facades with timber panels above the doorways and varying the design of each storey. On the first floor, french windows open onto louvred balconies made of galvanised metal, while on the second balconies are recessed with iroko wood louvres.

Perhaps what is most surprising about the new design is that these low-rise structures, with their emphasis on individuality and private space, have not come at the expense of housing density. In fact, with 355 habitable rooms a hectare, Angell Town is more space-efficient than its predecessor, with its flats lined up like coops for battery hens.

The design objectives that the architect and residents set out together have turned an estate into a neighbourhood. The openness of the new layout and the lightness of the brickwork combine to form a brighter, friendlier streetscape, and residents now have highly individual, stylish homes in which they can take pride.

In fact, seeing the positive way in which the community worked to transform its environment, Louis Farrakhan's live video link may not have much more to teach it about empowerment.