The Cotton Garden Estate in Westminster is a low-rise housing scheme that demonstrates a different face of London brutalism: rather than the vertical drama of the towers, a dense, interlocking arrangement of maisonettes and flats in a compact urban block. The architecture uses exposed concrete and brick with the same material directness as the larger schemes, but at a human scale that sits within its surrounding streetscape.
The estate represents a strand of British social housing that has largely been forgotten in favour of the more photogenic towers — but which may represent a more successful model of dense urban living. The outdoor spaces between the blocks, the shared circulation, and the variety of unit types speak of a planning culture that understood housing as community infrastructure.