Jake Brown, Architect, Activist, Potter and Photographer

PHILIP BOYLE on the career of a talented municipal architect

First published Summer 2014

Model of Jake Brown’s Prebend Street school

Francis Owen Brown (Jake to all who knew him) was of that generation that grew up during WWII. Following military service in the army he studied architecture at Sheffield University where he met and married Pam, a fellow student. They moved to London where he obtained work at the newly founded and expanding London County Council Architects' Department.

This was the beginning of a lifelong commitment both personal and professional. Despite the closing of the Architects' Department in 1987, he founded, chaired and largely ran the Greater London Architecture Club (GLAC) until his health declined. The club started within the Local Authority to encourage its members to do extra curricular activities such as visits, talks and debates. It continued independently following the Greater London Council's demise.

Jake's early work at the LCC was in the area of Health (the understandable priority). First he worked for the South West Metropolitan Hospital Board on hospitals, and he then worked on Chertsey Maternity Home. With the changes resulting from the LCC changing into the GLC his work load expanded into Housing and Flats and then into the most basic of Local Authority building types 'Refuse Disposal'. Jake would often self deprecatingly recount that if there was a job nobody wanted, then 'they' (The Management?) would say 'get Brown'. Given his talent, this has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless it led to one of his finest achievements. Sited to the south west of the Piccadilly tube line to Heathrow, where it crosses the M4 and the overhead road dips to ground level beyond the corridor of office blocks, there is a group of Local Authority buildings devoted to refuse disposal. One of these buildings commands this most banal of mixed skylines. It is The Brentford Refuse Transfer Station.

Its authority comes not from what it might contain but from its colour and its external form. Respectively a deep yellow ochre, and a simple continuous ribbed metal box shape with integral shallow pitched roof. Large grouped vertical flues of varying height and cowls (immediately reminiscent of Gaudi's roofscape to the Casa Mila in Barcelona) shoot upwards, silhouetted. This is an industrial building which is confident and robust, celebratory, and cheerfully lighting up the surrounding banal forms, but within a wonderful spatial context caused by the arbitrary large scale transport infrastructure. At the time of its arrival it rightfully won an award for Best Industrial Building from the Financial Times for the GLC Architects' Department, in the group led by Jake Brown.

He was so self effacing about his architecture and it was with regret that his carefully detailed and proportioned, delicate insitu concrete special school in Prebend Street, Islington was demolished without the chance of the slightest protest from any of us a few years ago. His enthusiasm for modernism in all areas brought him to DOCOMOMO and while his health permitted he was a long standing and attentive participant at our events, but his interests were wide in music, art, cinema, pottery and photography.

He was an activist throughout his architectural career as co-founder of SAG (Salaried Architects' Group), as an RIBA Councillor and as co-founder and chair of GLAC. He was also chair and founder of the Belsize Park Conservation Committee. These commitments probably cost him some opportunities in gaining architectural projects but he was a formidable protagonist in many campaigns. This was throughout a period when so many on the 'left' were poseurs and tended to be ineffectively pompous. Even if he took his time to make his arguments, Jake was always a real thinker and had real points to make.

Like The Brentford Refuse Transfer Station, an unforgettable character, Jake was a considerable physical presence. In appearance a cross between a bearded Karl Marx and a bearded William Morris (an image he cultivated), almost a Post Renaissance figure of God? Jake had a verbal manner of slow seriousness which demanded attention, together with a visual style of writing and drawing of eloquent, robust, and impish humour.

Jake Brown is survived by his wife Pam and by their daughter Penny.