Feature: Film - One Below The Queen: Rowley Way Speaks For Itself - a candid look at Neave Brown's iconic Swiss Cottage housing estate

Published: 27 May 2010
by DAN CARRIER

IT has featured in TV police drama The Sweeney and used as a backdrop for numerous episodes of The Bill. The late Anthony Minghella set his Jude Law film Breaking and Entering in its flats and passageways. 

Now the Swiss Cottage estate is the star of a new film. 

Masterminded by resident and documentary film maker Matthew Rosenberg, One Below The Queen, as the film is called, was created by the people who live there: it offers a fascinating insight to the joys – and occasional grief – of life on Alexandra and Ainsworth estate, commonly known as Rowley Way.

Matthew has lived on the estate for six years with his young family. He and his film partner Sav Kyriacou run a charity called Digital Works. It offers chances for people to learn about film-making – and then use the medium to tell their own stories. Feted globally by architects but also the subject of a two-and-a-half-year public inquiry into it’s cost when it was built and suffering from years of neglect, the estate gave Digital Works a wonderful topic for their cameras that was literally on their doorsteps.

While the comments are not all positive, they show that whether you love it or hate it,  the estate, built by Camden Council between 1968 and 1978, stirs emotions.

Matthew admits that when he first moved to Rowley Way, he had never heard of the designer responsible, Neave Brown, nor knew of the estate’s illustrious architectural history.

“I found out about it slowly – I kept seeing the estate appear on TV, and depicted in a bad way,” he said. As the film points out, when production companies use it as a location, they have to bring their own “abandoned mattresses and ripped bags of litter”.

“Architects thought it was an amazing building, while it was used by film makers to epitomise the worst of social housing projects. It occurred to me: why not get my neighbours to speak for themselves?,” he added.

Matthew and his partner spoke to neighbours and the youth centre and put together a team of all ages to learn how to operate the cameras, photography and conduct interviews.

Matthew contacted Neave and got the blessing of the architect to go ahead: Neave features throughout the film, speaking about how the plan got off the ground and what his vision for the estate was.

“We were clear that we did not want simply to create a piece a which would be head banging about the problems of living here,” recalls Matthew. 

Instead it became a eulogy to the concept of social housing, of creating a community, with bouquets and brickbats in equal measure. The film is not a simple rosy picture: instead the issues that any estate in London has to face is considered.

“There are some problems, but it is like anywhere else,” admits Matthew.

Comments range from “one of my neighbours said it is like Alacatraz” and “it is an enormous concrete crocodile that has been in an accident” to “I live in a penthouse apartment in a Grade II-listed building in St Johns Wood”. 

Some of the interviewees talk of being scared to go out at night, of anti-social behaviour, drug use, spooky damp garages, bad maintenance programmes and the dog mess. Others speak of lives flooded with natural light, of watching children of all backgrounds play happily together outside, and that social problems are not caused by the actual estate, but the wider society it sits in.

As well as telling the estate’s story for future generations, the film has reduced suspicion between different age groups living there.

“It was a real intergenerational project,” says Matthew. “Young people worked with older people. Previously these generations did not have much contact with one another. The older ones were particularly struck by young people’s energy, their thoughtfulness – they helped break down negative stereotypes.”

“This is a celebration of a commitment to social housing that came out of that time,” says Matthew. The result is an honest and moving portrayal of life in Swiss Cottage, circa 2010.

• One Below The Queen: Rowley Way Speaks For Itself can be viewed at www.rowleyway.org.uk