Neave Brown

After a public enquiry linked to overshooting costs and exceeding deadlines tried, unsuccessfully, to blame the architect, his reputation was nonetheless severely damaged in the UK, and for the rest of his architectural career he worked on often-lauded projects elsewhere in Europe.

[14] National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/113) with Neave Brown in 2013–14 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.

37 no.9 in 1967, Brown gives an account on the driving principles behind the "[changing] attitudes"[18] towards housing at the time, emancipating himself from the Modern Movement: Instead of understanding the past as a mere ground for the figure of prominent modern towers the texture of the old is accepted as the context in which new is built, "exist[ing] side by side".

[18] He praises the nineteenth century streets as providing "immediacy of relationship between house and neighbourhood",[18] and "the traditional quality of background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive".

[19] Similarly the modern architect should provide concepts that "relate each house to its neighbour and to its open space, determine the desirable relationships between housing and the attendant functions"[20] Furthermore, the modernist "isolation of the slab"[21] has to be overcome again it is "the architect's job to structure the environment".