Architect sounds out his tenants, David Winder, The Christian Science Monitor
John MacDonald, a post office employee, said, “I live on the 25th floor, but you couldn’t drag my wife and me out of the place now even though we lived on the ground floor before.”

Harry Smith, a production manager at a local factory, said “I’m one whose central heating isn’t working… There’s also very bad workmanship, but the kitchen is well thought out and the balcony is safe - children can toddle about easily.”

Patrick Hayden, a docker and father of two young children, said, “Despite what people keep on saying about high-rise buildings we like them.”

High life of splendid isolation, Jean Stead, The Guardian
Mr Harry Smith, a production manager, at a factory near by, likes living on the 25th floor. He said yesterday: “I was making 17-mile journeys every day. I used to be exhausted. Now I’m two minutes from work and I feel marvellous.”

But there are more reasons than good views for liking life at the top. Enough of all that talk about children making friends in the community play centre and women chatting on the balconies. “I like the isolation,” said Mr Smith, simply “We have four grandchildren and spend a lot of time with them. This flat is ideal for getting away.”

Goldfinger pays his full whack at the top, Walter Partington, Daily Express
Said Hungarian-born Mr. Goldfinger: “Families will spend most of their lives in the flats I design. I must do everything possible to iron out any problems.”

Finding the high life in Poplar, The Guardian
Mr Goldfinger wants to get “the feel” of living in the building he designed for London’s East Enders. “I want to experience, at first-hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whistling around the tower, and any problems which might arise from my designs so that I can correct them in the future.” he said in a GLC press release. “I feel it will be an invaluable exercise from which I and future tenants, will certainly gain a great deal.”

Evening Standard Reporter
Architect Mr Erno Goldfinger is to “sample his own cooking” by becoming a tenant for about two months in a skyscraper block of flats he designed for the Greater London Council.

Mr Plummer said: “Mr. Goldfinger told me he thought it would be advantageous in his future designs if he could live for a few weeks in one of the flats, so I invited him to move in.”

Architect sounds out his tenants, David Winder, The Christian Science Monitor
A London architect has given tenants of his new high-rise apartment building a change to take any complaints straight to the top.

Dissatisfied residents of Balfron Towers in London’s East End may take their complaints to architect Erno Goldfinger’s 25th-floor eyrie. If the problem can be solved, he would do something about it.

For two months Mr and Mrs Goldfinger lived in the apartment building. Partly they wanted to find out what technical faults were built into the apartments that could be eliminated from future designs.

But their stay was also a sociological experience. It was an attempt to see whether criticism that high-rise buildings were impersonal and unsuitable (especially for families with young children) were justified.
…
What then has the Greater London Council learned from Mr. Goldfinger’s experiment?

According to Desmond Plummer, leader the GLC, it is that “high buildings do provide decent living conditions and that, depite the fact that some people don’t like them, there are a number of people who do. And this particularly goes for people with young toddlers.”

Mr. Goldfinger’s findings are expected to influence the GLC in its redevelopment of London’s old dock area.

High living sampled by architect, Daily Telegraph
After six days of life high above the East End, Mr Goldfinger said: “I am enjoying this no end. I would love to live here.”

He said he had found only a few snags, and his first week had confirmed his view that tall blocks with open spaces were the “ideal of the moment”.

“I have wanted to build this for 30 years,” he added. “It will help bring the countryside to London.”

He said the flats had been designed specifically for families with small children. Each flat has a balcony and windows that can be locked.

East End’s tallest block of flats make ‘ideal homes’, East London Advertiser
“I would like to live here permanently,” he said. “I have found nothing that will make me alter any of my future designs.”

“The sound proofing here is perfect. This, of course, is helped by my having put all noisy machinery, such as lifts and the waste disposal unit, in a separate tower.”

“These flats are really my idea of ideal homes.”

Although Mr. Goldfinger is pleased with his flats, some local people have criticised tall blocks, saying they have destroyed the East End community spirit.

But the architect dismissed this as “rubbish.” He said: “I have created here nine separate streets on nine different levels, all with their own rows of front doors.”

“The people living here can sit on their deerstep and chat to the people next door if they want to. A community spirit is still possible even in these tall blocks, and any criticism that it isn’t is just rubbish.”

He went on: “These tall blocks are wonderful, in as much as they enable us to bring the countryside into the towns.”

“If we build up instead of out we have enough room for green spaces, lawns and trees, where children can play.”

“And if any of the mothers do not want to let their children down to ground level to play, there are playrooms in the corridors connecting the flat block and the block containing the noisy equipment.”

Architect with his head in the clouds, The Guardian
Sir, -

It does seem extraordinary that we can still go on building 26-storey blocks of flats such as the Poplar one recetly shown in the “Gurardian.” “Warehouses for storing human beings” was a term used not so long ago by an architectural critic for a similar housing scheme. It seems apt. The regrettable thing is that designers and town-planners should have so lost sight of ordinary human values and basic common sense that they could ever have imagined that a family could have live happily in monsters such as the Poplar block.

The main reason for this, I suggest, is that most housing designers today design for “them” - creatures from another planet - seldom for themselves. It can all be done from the safety of a terraced house in Hampstead. And, of course, the old East End terraces - with all their horrors and lack of plumbing - offered more conviviality and less restrictions than the modern tower.

Also it is now known that a tower is not the only answer to high-density urban living. Children always have needed to run about in the open on the ground. They always will. And parents have always liked to be somewhere near in control. They always will. In spite of all the town-planning jargon and the density figures. -

Yours faithfullly,

George Perkin
7 Archway Street. London SW 13 

Ernö Goldfinger: “The flats I’ve built in Tower Hamlets for the Greater London Council, overlooking the river, the docks and Greenwich, try to solve, beside the normal problems of architecture and buildings, problems of economics, population density, the problems of children, teenagers and old people, and the problem of cars - the segregation of pedestrian from traffic.”

Dennis Sharp, Goldfinger on the ground, The Architects’ Journal, 17 July 1968
Following on from the press conference and the report he prepared on his stay in his own high rise block, Balfron Tower (AJ 22.5.68). Ernö Goldfinger spoke more informally - without jacket and tie, but with the characteristic cigar and a glass of whisky - about his findings at the AA recently.

Clearly his experience has reinforced his self-confessed ‘romantic’ conviction that high density, high rise building are the old answer to metropolitan living - at least for the mass working population. The ground is freed for other uses and for landscaping, the blocks add a new dimension to grotty, congested area and the views out are magnificent.

Although an attempt was made after the talk to broaden the argument (the chairman, Hal Moggridge, had little sympathy with Mr Goldfinger’s high rise views), the lecturer would have none of it. Justifiably so perhaps, for here was an architect talking about a group of buildings (stage one was for a twenty-six-storey tower, a one- and two-storey old people’s block and shop) that was successful from many points of view.

The powerfully modelled tower, which rehouses 146 families from Tower Hamlets, was filled in record time and without doubt many of the new tenants enjoy the building immensely. There have been no complaints of feeling unsafe in the block but there were problems, most of which were of a technical or design nature. The high windows on the external walls in some of the rooms were disliked, the indoor play area was not large enough for supervised play, the separated service tower and the bridge access points had fallen foul of the local vandals.

Dennis Sharp, Goldfinger on the ground, AA
What one admires about this experiment is the intensity of thought and public response that has come out of it. It is not for nothing that Goldfinger has been made an honorary member of the Tenants’ Association. Few architects can claim that distinction.

The High Life, Building
Goldfinger is a large and somewhat daunting figure, but this has not deterred his new East End neighbours. Both he and his wife have established “very pally relationships. They visit me all the time, they stop me in the lifts, they speak to me in the streets,” he says. “There is already a terrific sense of community, an atmosphere of an East End Street, but elevated, with views.”

Did he not think that more architects should follow my example? “I would not presume to suggest that other architects should follow my example,” he says, adding rather wickedly, “presumably they are clever enough not to have to check their designs pragmatically.”

The High Life, Building
“There is already a terrific sense of community, an atmosphere of an East End Street, but elevated, with views."

Terence Bendixson, Box Mania, The Guardian
In this world of asphalt, noise, railings, and gloomy subways Erno Goldfinger, the distinguished private architect, has chosen to pack most of the dwellings into tall concrete towers that are already stained with rust. The first tower, although perversely beautiful, conjures up thoughts of prisons and pill-boxes. Here, too, vandalism is setting in.

Balfron and Trellick Tower have both been reputed to act as the inspiration for JG Ballard's dystopian novel of savage societal breakdown, High Rise, where the the tower is arranged in distinct social strata according to height and architect, Anthony Royal, lives in the penthouse "hovering over [them] like some kind of fallen angel."

Sue Roalman, East London Advertiser

The 400-odd residents of Balfron Towers in Poplar have something in common with Tory housing boss George Tremlett: they agree that high-rise living, at its worse, can be a ghastly and isolating experience.

From the vacant depths of the garage, I shot straight to the top floor (the lift was working, but reportedly had only just been fixed) where the corridors were neat and tidy, but eerily empty.

Fifty-nine-year-old Harold Byford, who has lived alone, at the top for two years, says he feels like a “battery chicken in a box” in his flat. He rarely sees his neighbours, but admits that is partly his fault, as he has only once knocked at a neighbours’s door. That was on Christmas.

Still, he believes the design of the flats has contributed to the ‘indifference’ which people tend to show towards one another; and which he feels, follows from being physically isolated.

“Once I locked myself out of my flat and had to smash the front window to get in, Mr Byford recalled. “Did anyone stick their head out of the door to see what was happening?” He shakes his head. No one.

Such a “keep yourself to yourself” attitude has made Balfron Towers easy pickings for vandals and thieves. Mr. Byford has twice been burgled.

At the other end of the age spectrum, 31/2 year-old Sian Godwin has also lived at Balfron for two years in her short life. And her mother, 21 year old Kerry Godwin, thinks the strain is starting to show in her daughter’s behaviour.

“She gets ever so aggressive and destructive being cooped up in the flat all day,” said Ms. Godwin. “She never gets the chance to play with children her age, because there’s just no where to take them around here.”

Ms. Godwin, a single parent with another child, two-year-old Nicholas, says the difficulty for all of them is enormous, particularly because the flat is so poorly designed for children.

The window opens at the bottom, so either one could fall out if I weren’t watching,” she says. “My only hope is to get Sian into a nursery soon so she will have a chance to play safely with other children.”

Sue Roalman, East London Advertiser
The 400-odd residents of Balfron Towers in Poplar have something in common with Tory housing boss George Tremlett: they agree that high-rise living, at its worse, can be a ghastly and isolating experience.

Speaking at a meeting of high-powered planners from the Royal Institute of British Architects, Mr. Tremlett last week lambasted his audience for deigning high-rise blocks ‘almost unspeakable in their ghastliness.’

And he pin-pointed Balfrom Towers - looming 25 stories high on the edge of Northern Approach to the Blackwall Tunnel - as an example of the worst in high rise design.

“Tiptoe through the mess beneath Balfron Towers and see the legacy your profession has left,” he challenged them.

Whether or not the designers took up the challenge, the Advertiser was down there this week.

From the vacant depths of the garage, I shot straight to the top floor (the lift was working, but reportedly had only just been fixed) where the corridors were neat and tidy, but eerily empty.

The high-rise housing schemes which he built for the GLC were a product of this consideration in every detail, designed to secure 'sun, space, and greenery' for their inhabitants... But in Goldfinger's hands the millenial utopian vision has acquired an air of menace, the ideal has been pushed to its very limits.

The sheer scale and drama of their architecture are exciting, but unnerving. Exciting because the control of form is so complete. The rhythms of the facades, founded on the mathematical control of proportion, ore a statement of formal architectural values unequalled in this country, l would say, since Lutyens, a perfect resolution of horizontal and vertical elements. Raw concrete has rarely seemed so beautiful, its detailing handled with a knowledge beginning with Perret. The sequence of space and form is varied, picturesque, never repetitive: under a low evening sun one has the feeling of participation in an heroic landscape.

But it is unnerving not only because of scale - 28 storeys at Rowlett Street, 30 at Edenham Street - but because of the choice of elements of a distinctly minatory character. lt is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artefacts of war. The sheer concrete walls of the circulation towers are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they import a delicate sense of terror. At the summit of the tower the boiler house is cantilevered far out; with its ribbon glazing and surmounted by flues it evokes the bridge of a warship. At night the estate is illuminated by the merciless beam of powerful arclights mounted at the summit of the slab.
…
The intellectual power required to create a significant work of ort can often seem frightening to others. lt requires strength to be inspired by it and not run for cover. Goldfinger's is a demanding architecture, whose place is at the centre of intellectual life.

But the Elephant and Castle has no theatricality: it is in earnest. Its message appears to be that the Utopia which was the goal of the Modern Movement will not be achieved without a grim struggle. Idealism has been confronted with the material imperative of Structural-Rationalism - and has been stiffened by the exchange. To the distant promise of a social revolution has been added a consciousness of the excitement, and violence, of the battle to bring it about

A similar interaction can be traced in the two GLC housing schemes, though with an outcome of different emphasis. There are varied building types in both estates, but it is possible here simply to concentrate on the most distinctive feature of both - the central slab block.

The theory of high-rise housing is a direct product of the idealist tradition in modern architecture. The rarefied ‘sun, space, and greenery’ that was to be provided was of an essentially utopian nature. Furthermore, for many architects the high-rise form offered the opportunity to provide centralised domestic services, and thus to overcome the inefficiencies of individual domestic management - an idea that in the eyes particularly of Constructivist architects had socialist connotations. In 1933 at the CIAM conference Goldfinger exhibited his own such proposal - a high-rise housing unit for 700 people, equipped with centralised communal services. It was to take the form of a free-standing slab 22 storeys high and wedge-shaped in plan, with all the vertical circulation and communal facilities at the broader end.

When in 1963 Goldfinger was offered his first large high-density housing site by the LCC at Roulette Street in Poplar, it carried a provisional brief for four point blocks. But he combined them into a single slab 27 storeys high, with vertical circulation and communal facilities concentrated at one end, housing approximately 600. A similar block, 31 storeys high and incorporating various improvements, formed the central feature of his Cheltenham Estate at Edenham Street in North Kensington five years later.

Though similar in size to the CIAM housing, these blocks were quite new in plan and section. Instead of a central corridor on each floor, there were now, in response to the LCC brief, dual-aspect flats served by an enclosed access gallery on every third floor. Contemporary schemes based on this principle, such as Park Hill at Sheffield, had frequently involved very tortuous and unsatisfactory flat plans. Goldfinger’s section was clear: it allowed three flats to be served per bay by each gallery - a four-person flat above and below, and a two-person flat on the same floor - with access directly into the centre of each flat. 

As if in response to a more ‘Idealist’ brief, the architecture here appears more Corbusian in character than at the Elephant and Castle. The row of ‘pulpit’ balconies at mid-height on the front elevation, which marks the position of a row of six-person maisonettes, and the heavy modelling of the facade are reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Quartier de la Marine office skyscraper project for Algiers, of 1939. The clear articulation of each element is in the Elementarist manner of Constructivism, the wide separation of the tower from the main block allowing a dramatic interpenetration of space.

But the control of the detail is Rationalist. The concrete, the predominant surface material, is bush-hammered as in Perret, without the element of ‘disguise’ intrinsic in the more picturesque Corbusian shutterboarding. The structural slabs and crosswalls are clearly expressed on elevation. The access galleries, which project with their heavily radiused upper and lower profiles resemble a row of railway carriages, are supported on pronounced concrete brackets, providing a very satisfying visual support. Like many structural elements in Goldfinger’s architecture, they are scaled above simple structural necessity in order to provide a sense of visual stability, and thus illustrate the classical French Rationalist belief in the importance of le vraisemblable over le vrai. Te rhythm established by these brackets, and by the windows, the slabs, and the crosswalls is of a profound harmony, the perfect Classical balance of horizontal and vertical elements.

The design of these blocks is in fact a highly original synthesis, and is perhaps Goldfinger’s most expressive invention. The lift tower, taller than the main block and set emphatically to one side, creates an extraordinary, almost sinister asymmetrical outline, as though in unstable equilibrium - an effect enhanced by the extreme slenderness of the block. The softness of the high-rise ideal - the cité-jardin verticale with its rolling greensward - has been injected with a more urgent imagery. The boiler house at Edenham Street is cantilevered far out from the summit of the lift tower and, with its four chimneys and continuous band of glazing, resembles the bridge of a warship. The sheer concrete walls of the lift tower are pierced only by slits, which cascade down the facade like rain, bearing a hint of menace. Above all the sheer scale of the blocks is exciting, but unnerving - a scale which is emphasised at night by powerful flood-lights which illuminate the estate from the summit of the slab. The battle for the Ideal has still to be fought… ‘For me Viollet-le-Duc is the first modern architect… It must always be possible to see, and feel, how a building is supported’ Goldfinger has said. This Rationalist sense of structural integrity, together with the power of identifying emotionally with the users of his buildings, are the essential elements of his architecture. From them it derives its purity and power.

Erno Goldfinger talks to The Architectural Review

AR - If you were given a Rowlett Street or even an Edenham Street site to design housing for today, would you tackle it in the same way?

EG - Of course. I always approach a brief in the same way. I try to satisfy the requirements in the case of housing: biological, social, financial etc… with the means at our disposal: structural, mechanical etc… If the briefs were identical I would probably find similar solutions, plus the experience of a further 15 years.

I would like to add a few words regarding the controversy of ‘high-rise’ buildings. The main trouble with ‘high-rise’ buildings in this country is the incompetence of managements:

1. Rehousing is done in a haphazard way. For instance, so called ‘problem families’ are dumped into unfamiliar surroundings, saddled with rents they cannot afford and are given practically no help to adjust.
2. Maintenance is lamentable
3. Supervision is inadequate, incompetent and spiteful
4. Vandalism is practically encouraged by persons who are antagonistic to this sort of development
5. Tenants who are satisfied just let it be… only those who are dissatisfied complain
6. The only complaint I came across - when living on the top floor of one of the buildings I designed and when I had my office at the foot of another for three years - was high rent.

For a short period in the 1960s, tower blocks got out of control. By that time, it was the speed with which builders could put them up that was getting them built, and most architects were cured of them. One who was not was Ernö Goldfinger, whose extraordinary Trellick Tower and Balfron Tower are isolated statements of French monumentalism and concrete technique in the unexpected settings of North Kensington and Poplar. The only worthy points of comparison are the vertiginous, triangular pencils of the Barbican, an enclave which turns its back upon nature and the life of the street with equally un-English fervour. Perhaps time will make these tough developments seem to fit in better with the fertile and internationally influential tradition of planned housing in London.

Aesthetically, London’s best high modern buildings are the two strange housing towers by that tough-minded disciple of Auguste Perret, the late Ernö Goldfinger.

In an oral history interview, a resident explained that during the filming of Shopping, corridor and car park lights were turned off for long periods. The set designers added props to make the tower seem grim; putting scaffolding up along the walkway leading to the tower, cladding it in corrugated iron and spraying it with graffiti; leaving an abandoned cars strewn around the estate; replacing functioning lamp-posts with broken, bent versions. When the film crew left, they repainted the fencing and restored everything else but they forgot to replace the lamp post which remained, bent and unfunctioning, for a further week.

The film which features the tower most prominently is Paul WS Anderson’s 1994 Shopping. Over incessant pulsing trance-techno we are introduced to a dark post-industrial city of blast furnaces and hollow factories, centred around a dilapidated tower block and its gang of teenage residents who indulge in joyriding and ram-raiding. Making his debut leading role, Jude Law plays the nihilistic Billy, all leather jacket and reckless charm, released from prison and soon back to his life of aimless rebellion. 

The first we see of Balfron is a slow pan up as Billy walks along the podium walkway, under a makeshift scaffolded entranceway with hung red lamps, and further up as the tower comes in to view, its geometric pattern of flats behind the horizontal ladder frame, and further up to the three bright rooftop downlights. He arrives at a dimly-lit tiled corridor and an iron-gated down-flat where he used to live.

We return to the tower repeatedly, either thick in mist or the dark of night, filled by young gangs wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails who skulk around corrugated iron walls, contorted street lamps and the carcasses of police cars. Sean Bean arrives for a brief cameo in a black Mercedes, thick striped suit and jewellery, and pulls into the underground car park lit only from street light filtering in through coffered ceiling. ‘Look at this place,’ he mutters to his driver. 'How do people live in this filth?’ He walks along a ground floor corridor completely blanketed in graffiti, ‘This whole estate’s a disgrace’.

Lewis Chester, High & mighty, The Guardian Weekend
Goldfinger’s influence was international but his most massive structures are all in London, though not in fashionable locations. You have to go down to Poplar in London’s East End to appreciate Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower punching its brushed concrete fist 27 storeys into the sky.
...
“Goldfinger wasn’t just larger than life,” said Sam Webb, “he was mega larger than life. The only parallel I can think of is with de Gaulle, you know, the way he became France. Well Erno became his buildings, and his buildings became Erno.” Those who had the temerity to criticise could expect no quarter. Richard Napper, who has spent most of his career as an architect in London’s East End, remembers an explosive encounter with Goldfinger in the early 1970s when they were both, in their different ways, on the up. Napper had begun work on the design for Patriot Square, a low-rise housing estate estate in Bethnal Green which is now in the process of being “listed”. Goldfinger, meantime, was trailing clouds of glory for having “lived” at the top of Balfron Tower for all of two months before making it back to the verge of Hampstead Heath. He pronounced the Balfron experience “exhilarating”.

Napper thought that Balfron was “socially disastrous” and that Goldfinger’s PR antic was pure personal grandstanding at the expense of an area that could well do without it. He volunteered this view to Goldfinger when they met at party in Highgate and spent the next two hours being bawled all round the house. Napper believes he held his own when Goldfinger occasionally paused for breath, but acknowledges that he could find absolutely no answer to the concluding roar: “Young man, you are nothing but a greenhorn. I will have you know that my finger is not the only member of my body that is golden.”
...
“They’re really lovely, aren’t they?” said Frances Clarke, director of the National Tower Blocks Network, leafing through reproductions of the original drawings for Balfron and Trellick. “You can see why councils in the 1960s were so excited to build them. Such a pity.” Clarke would remain dry-eyed if every tower block were razed to the ground. But her current campaign is focused on the more limited objective of trying to get young families housed at lower levels. Golgfinger’s towers are among her targets, but it is hard to make an impression. Tower Hamlets council says it tries - not always successfully - to rehouse young families below the sixth floor at Balfron. Kensington and Chelsea says that “in an ideal world” it would like to impose a similar restriction at Trellick, but the scarcity of public housing resources make it impossible.

Balfron Tower accompanies the screeching riff and drug-fuelled lyrics of Britpop band Oasis’ track Morning Glory where it appears from acute angles under a filter which colours the sky amber and stains the concrete a rusty hue. In the opening staccato shots of the music video the tower is interspersed with glimpses of a flat with small windows where the Gallaghers play deafeningly and a bleak strip-lit lino factory corridor where a cast of fellow residents ineffectually scream and pound on the door.

In the late 1940s and 1950s Britain designed the best council housing in the world. Our selection represents only the cream of what was produced… It was left to the stalwart Ernö Goldfinger, a pioneer of the early international congresses on public housing in the 1930s, to continue to design tall blocks of real quality: his Balfron Tower is already listed, and Trellick Tower is also recommended.

In the late 1940s and 1950s Britain designed the best council housing in the world. Our selection represents only the cream of what was produced… It was left to the stalwart Ernö Goldfinger, a pioneer of the early international congresses on public housing in the 1930s, to continue to design tall blocks of real quality: his Balfron Tower is already listed, and Trellick Tower is also recommended.

The East End of London was physically reconstructed. Two square miles of the badly bombed Poplar area became the largest Comprehensive Development Area in Britain, housing a population larger than that of many a New Town. Chrisp Street Market, the Lansbury estate, the Balfron Tower, the Robin Hood Gardens estate, presented:

‘a totally new world, dominated by the tall blocks of flats and by the lower terraces of the three- and four-storey maisonettes, standing in spacious gardens and landscaped squares.’ (Peter Hall, The World Cities (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966)

The mood, as can be seen, was intensely hopeful. The architectural style was modern, derived from the heroic theorists the 1920s and 30s - the Russian Constructivists, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school - for whom modern architecture was synonymous with social progress. 

The 28-storey Balfron Tower formed the major element of an LCC housing project known as the Rowlett Street estate, and is not administered as part of the adjacent Brownfield Estate. It provides 156 apartments of a variety of sizes served by an access gallery on every third floor. Its crosswalks are at 22’ 0” centres (Goldfinger’s 11” module x 24), and its principle façade is built around a central feature of double square proportion - the honeycomb stack of full-width balconies of the west-facing flats, which measures 108’ 4” x 216’ 8”. Marking the dividing line between these two squares is a row of double-height balconies corresponding to a row of six-person maisonettes. The proportion of these voids is within 1.5 per cent of Golden Section (20’ 8” x 12’ 11 1/2”), and lying on the diagonal is the front of the small pulpit-like balconies serving the upper floor of the maisonettes, which are also of Golden Section ratio (7’ 2” x 4’ 5”). The overall proportions of the slab (excluding the detached stair and lift tower) possibly has an intended relationship to the Golden Section (the ratio of overall width to height excluding parapet conforms), but it is not one that is clearly legible.

In John Strickland’s gritty and long 'Greenwich Mean Time', notable for a decent soundtrack and acting as a springboard for a few careers such as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s, eight South London schoolmates cope with turmoil in their twenties. Balfron Tower features as the home of dealer Elroy, played by Freddie Annobil-Dodoo, who lives on the top floor, from which he enlists Bean, played by Ben Waters, a former freeform trumpeter who becomes an increasingly sallow junky, to push crack around the estate. The red and olive of the bleak swings and railings at the foot of the tower are echoed in the distasteful colour scheme of Elroy’s flat, considerate only in helping to distract us from the unpleasant scenes that take place there.

The relationship that Goldfinger established with the LCC at the Elephant and Castle let to his three principal subsequent commissions, the Haggerston School, and his two major housing schemes, dominated by Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower respectively. The 28-storey Balfron Tower, begun in 1965, forms part of the Brownfield Estate adjacent to the northern approach to Blackwall Tunnel in east London, where Goldfinger went on to build two other substantial blocks, Carradale House and Glenkerry House, as well as a number of smaller buildings. Balfron Tower itself contains 146 apartments of various sizes served by access galleries on every third floor, leading to a widely detached lift and service tower at the northern end. The dramatic relationship between these two elements of the tower, and the space between them, constitutes one of Goldfinger’s most powerful inventions. He explained that the boilers, rubbish chute and lifts were generators of noise and this justified their being widely separated from the flats themselves. The larger buildings are of bush-hammered concrete, the smaller of brick, and they are of crosswall construction. The crosswalk of Balfron Tower are on 22’ 0” centres (2’ 9” module x 8), and its principal façade is designed around a central feature of exactly double square proportion: the honeycomb stack of full-width windows and balconies of the west-facing flats, which measures 108’ 4” x 216’ 8”. Marking the dividing line between the two squares is a row of double-height balconies corresponding to a row of larger maisonettes inside. The proportion of these voids is within 1.5% of Golden Section (20’ 8” x 12’ 11 1/2”), and lying on the diagonal are the small pulpit-like balconies serving the upper level of the maisonettes, which are also of Golden Section proportion (7’ 2” x 4’ 5”).

The architecture was further distorted and corrupted by the economies, bureaucracy and politics of a large public programme, so that what in the end it delivered - forests of close-set towers in an unreformed urban environment - was precisely what Le Corbusier had warned against. Most dangerously of all, it's application was widely separated from, and lost sight of, its real users, the inhabitants of the buildings. The RIBA chose to believe, somewhat against the evidence, that sociology had given high-rise housing the necessary stamp of approval. In the event, examples of estates or buildings that satisfied both the Modern Movement aesthetic and social criteria are few. Two possible candidates were the tower blocks of Erno Goldfinger in London, which after years of decay were eventually appreciated and hotly defended by some of their residents.

Meeting new needs
Balfron Tower sits close by the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, a major traffic artery. The recent road-widening scheme has brought increased traffic volume closer to the building, creating a need to soundproof and upgrade the windows. The occupants of the flats objected to the installation of secondary glazing, as great disruption would have been caused to internal fittings and all work would have been carried out inside each flat.

It was decided that replacement windows were the only practical solution. Because the budget was tight, a standard UPVC window was selected. It was at this point that Balfron Tower was spot-listed to ensure that the question of an architecturally sensitive solution could be fully addressed.

The question of new windows for Balfron Tower raises many points that are peculiar to the control of change in post-war social housing. The spot-listing meant that works that had already begun had to be interrupted. The standard windows destined to replace the originals before the spot-listing did not match the geometry of the Goldfinger windows; they also had ‘storm window’ casements set proud of the surrounding frame, unlike the original flush-fitting window and frame detail. Alternative timber products proved to be prohibitively expensive and were, in any case, further from Goldfinger’s original design due to a thicker section of the timber frames. A more suitable window design had to be sourced - one that was quickly available, would conform to current safety and performance standards, and was affordable. In the event, a French UPVC section was found that allowed a very close match with the original window section and geometry, and satisfied all the other requirements. The French UPVC windows were, therefore, chosen as the best solution that could be achieved given the tight constraints of time, resources and performance.

The windows at Balfron Tower raise a more general issue for large post-war social housing complexes. As these buildings are now thirty to forty years old, the question of replacing doors, windows or even external cladding will become more pressing. A balance must be struct between respecting the historic architecture and finding appropriate solutions to performance upgrading for thermal, acoustic or safety purposes.

The future of Balfron Tower
Most post-war public housing developments have suffered from inadequate or sporadic maintenance, due to tight funding restrictions on housing authorities. With the lack of a consistent, adequately funded maintenance and repair regime, urgent repairs can sometimes be underfunded and ill-advised.

Balfron Tower and its surrounding now need a comprehensive scheme of repair, landscaping and improvement. With the listing of the building, Tower Hamlets have recognized the need for special care to protect and enhance Balfron Tower. In consolation with English Heritage, the Council are considering the possibility of designating a conservation area around the whole group of Goldfinger buildings. Proposals are also being considered for an improved automatic entry system and the restoration of the public areas, including the distinctive marble and mosaic finishes that are characteristic of Goldfinger’s work.

Like the people of Lansbury, the inhabitants of Balfron Tower are protective of their building and frustrated by many years of inadequate fundings. The listing of the building and the inclusion of the whole group within a conservation area will assist Tower Hamlets Council, in cooperation with English Heritage, to harness regeneration resources in a sensitive manner.

Conservation and regeneration: a richer future for the social heritage
The listing of post-war public social housing has brought into focus the fundamental issues of what should be preserved and how best to achieve this. It is essential that the world of conservation learn the skills of the housing manager and understand the difficult choices imposed by limited funding. The accolade of listing can, however, support local people’s sense of value in their own environment and encourage high aspirations for repair and improvements.

The Government is committed to the regeneration of more than 2,000 deprived areas: major funding will be committed to housing repair, environmental improvement and other, wider social concerns. At the time of writing, a reshaped Single Regeneration Budget has already been given £3 billion to target 50 areas with populations of around 20,000. There has also been a release £3.6 billion from council house sales to fund further housing repair.

Many of the chosen areas may include buildings that are either listed or deserve to be considered for conservation area designation. A partnership between local bodies, housing departments, conservation officers and English Heritage can ensure that the substantial funds available will be used not merely to repair buildings, but to respect and restore real architectural quality and the special sense of place that often exists, masked by neglect and low resources. Previous attempts at estate regeneration in the public sector have often been criticised for being only skin deep and not addressing the causes of decay. Repairs and changes that do not respect the positive characteristics of buildings and places can often lead to a new spiral of decay.

The substantial new government funding is a spectacular opportunity to recover post-war optimism, rediscover the hidden riches of modern social architecture and enhance the lives of some of the most deprived people in our cities.

Heading east from the domestic scale of Lansbury, we come to a different architectural world, the Brownfield estate. Most of the estate is made up of unremarkable LCC and Poplar Council four-storey maisonettes. In St Leonards Road, however, is Balfron Tower, part of a housing development designed by Ernö Goldfinger, begun for the LCC in 1963. Balfron Tower is a boldly modelled concrete tower block containing ten maisonettes and 136 flats. It is a major landmark and shows Goldfinger’s mastery of concrete, which he gained in the 1920s with Auguste Perret in Paris. Balfron Tower is also notable for the clever device of having a separate lift and stair tower, linked at every third floor to the main block. This device reduced the need for corridors, thereby permitted more spacious flats, and providing a dramatic architectural articulation of the building form. Balfron Tower is complemented by a subsidiary group of buildings including flats for the elderly, a shop, community centre and under grounding car parking. The development was carried on to Goldfinger’s design in a more softly spoken idiom over the next ten years in further smaller blocks beyond the adjacent Carradale House.

Balfron Tower and its attendant building group constitute a major achievement of full-blooded modern architecture in the post-war period. It demonstrates that a social housing programme can be achieved with dramatic and high-quality architecture.

In an oral history interview a resident presented me with a photograph taken from their balcony during the filming of 28 Days Later. It showed bloodied mannequins strewn across the podium of the tower and in the children's playground.

In Danny Boyle’s harrowing sci-fi horror 28 Days Later, we view a deserted London through the haunting and gritty lens of digital video cameras giving the immediacy of a documentary. Jim and Selina wander abandoned streets, survivors of a virus that has spread to humans turning them into 'the infected’, frothing killers that attack in vicious bands. Balfron Tower offers the couple temporary salvation. They scale a barricade of upturned shopping trolleys - “What is it about tower blocks and shopping trolleys?” Jim asks - and escape zombies on the stairwell, climbing all the way to reach a candlelit top-floor flat occupied by a father and his daughter, the iron-gated number 157. 

Without running water, they visit the roof strewn with buckets and plastic sheeting to collect rainwater, but have to leave as the threat of attack grows by the day. “Sound carries in this flat, you know, jerry-built I suppose.”

The architect did not live to experience the belated appreciation of one of his finest buildings. Ernö Goldfinger died in 1987 at the time when his Trellick Tower, built for the GLC, had fallen into disrepute as a place of social trouble and violence. Meanwhile the Tower enjoys growing acceptance - above all by the young and prosperous adults who now populate it. Its predecessor, Balfron Tower in the East End, is still awaiting such gentrification.

Ernö grasped the opportunity to make a public commitment to the virtues of high-rise living. The building might look foreboding from the outside but, as he hoped to demonstrate, that was completely compatible with well-planned living spaces, with stunning views across London, daylight, heating and all the prerequisites for twentieth-century city living. In what even his critics conceded was at the very least an inspired publicity stunt, he and Ursula lived for two months in flat 130 on the twenty-sixth floor from February 1968, paying the full unsubsidised rent of £11.10s (compared with the subsidised rent of $4.15s.6d that council tenants would pay for the same flat). This resulted in coverage by the national press, television and radio, almost all of it favourable. Ernö even received fanmail, so unusual was it for an architect to inhabit the building he had designed, particularly when the building was intended as social housing and built on a tight budget. Ernö, Ursula and various members of the GLC posed for photographers on their balcony overlooking the Thames; television and radio interviewers made appointments to visit. But the Goldfinger’s stay was more than just publicity and a series of photo-opportunities. It was completely consistent with his view of the art of architecture that Ernö should want to experience the enclosed space he had created form the inside. He recognised the extent to which his designs would shape people’s lives and that this brought with it responsibilities:

“Families will spend most of their lives in the flats I design. I must do everything possible to iron out problems.”

He was also keen to answer critics of high-rise living, many of whom had never tried it and so in one sense didn’t know what they were talking about. He would be able to give a far more informed opinion of the benefits and problems when he had experienced them himself. Balfron was planned as the first of many high-rises he would design, and he wanted to benefit from this opportunity to learn about what worked and what needed further thought.
…
In fact Ernö’s empiricism paid off, both as promotion for high-rise living and as experimental testing of his design. One of the more frustrating features of Balfron, and not one that could be easily remedied within that building, was that there were only two lifts.
…
For the Goldfingers there was no question of simply living in the building and observing its functioning in a non-interactive way. They had a mission to facilitate the social intermingling of the tenants, ‘my tenants’ as Goldfinger grandly referred to them, though the phrase carried with it not just an arrogance (they were after all the GLC’s tenants), but also connotations of fatherly concern. This was social housing, not just housing. Goldfinger was well aware that for this project to work effectively, the people living within it had to relate appropriately to each other:

“The success of any scheme depends on the human factor – the relationships of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.”

The building was the shell within which these relationships evolved, though obviously its design and upkeep could facilitate or hinder their interactions.

In the case of Balfron, many of the tenants already knew each other because most of them had been rehoused street by street from the surrounding neighbourhood. Of the first 160 families housed in Balfron, only two were outside Tower Hamlets. Wherever possible, former neighbours were rehoused in flats sharing a common access gallery. The Goldfingers engaged in some gentle and well-lubricated social engineering by organising a series of parties. Floor by floor they invited the tenants up to their flat for champagne (a second fridge had to be installed to keep supplies well-chilled) and a chance to meet their neighbours as well as the the architect.
…
The Goldfingers’ genuine desire for the project to be a success, together with their approachability, were greatly appreciated. Those who met Ernö did not doubt his sincerity: ‘he was really considerate’ one declared, ‘He kept coming back after he had left to see how we were getting on.’ Ursula transcribed into her notebook how another woman expressed her enthusiasm: ‘Mrs Goldfinger you should stay longer! You are ACCEPTED! I know all the tenants and I’m telling the truth. You are ACCEPTED!’ Ursula would chat to neighbours in the lifts about their new homes or visit them, giving them the chance to point to flaws in the design of the buildings. She never heard anybody express the slightest regret about having left their old East End terraced houses, though they did have worries about the difficulty of cleaning windows, draughts, heating services not working properly, and the trumpeting noises in high winds. Many of the tenants, though, were exuberant about their new homes: ‘I wouldn’t change it for Buckingham Palace’ one declared.

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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In the case of Balfron, many of the tenants already knew each other because most of them had been rehoused street by street from the surrounding neighbourhood. Of the first 160 families housed in Balfron, only two were outside Tower Hamlets. Wherever possible, former neighbours were rehoused in flats sharing a common access gallery. 

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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Ursula would chat to neighbours in the lifts about their new homes or visit them, giving them the chance to point to flaws in the design of the buildings. She never heard anybody express the slightest regret about having left their old East End terraced houses, though they did have worries about the difficulty of cleaning windows, draughts, heating services not working properly, and the trumpeting noises in high winds. Many of the tenants, though, were exuberant about their new homes: ‘I wouldn’t change it for Buckingham Palace’ one declared.

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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To its E, on a difficult side close to the Northern Approach Road, BALFRON TOWER, part of the BROWNFIELD ESTATE by Ernö Goldfinger for the GLC, 1965-7. Its superior quality is at once apparent. The twenty-six-storey block is immediately arresting, with its slender semi-detached tower containing lift, services, and chunky oversailing boiler house. It was Goldfinger’s first public housing, a precursor of his similarly arranged and better known Trellick Tower, N Kensington. The lifts serve every third floor, and the flats vary in size. The rugged concrete surfaces have worn well, and contrast effectively with the floor-to-ceiling glazing. Equally impressive is the way in which this and the neighbouring CARRADALE HOUSE, 1967-9, are integrated within the surrounding spaces by well-detailed hard landscaping. Carradale House is a slab block of eleven storeys, with lift block in the centre, and some variety created by intermediate balconies. W of St Leonard’s Road the fifteen-storey GLENKERRY has more streamlined concrete balconies, curved at the ends. Banded concrete details, alternating with pale brick, are continued by two lower blocks along the planted walk to the W. The promising start gives way to an indifferent grid of the usual LCC/GLC mix of slabs of flats and lower terraces.

ERNÖ GOLDFINGER: Architect (1902-1987), Designing Modern Britain - Design Museum, Until 26 November 2006
Goldfinger’s tower blocks have since confounded his critics by proving to be robustly built and imaginatively planned. The Champagne parties at which he listened to – and learnt from – the complaints of the residents of Balfron Tower illustrate the underlying humanism in his architecture. Today the flats in Trellick, many of which passed into private ownership during the 1990s, are greatly sought after. Yet ambitious though he was for these monumental public schemes, even Goldfinger’s admirers concur that his best buildings were his smaller, beautifully proportioned and impeccably detailed projects at Albermarle Street and Willow Road where, the modern houses which once outraged Hampstead’s conservationists now belong to the National Trust.

This situation is not exceptional; similarly, once disdained modern buildings such as the housing tower blocks by Goldfinger are now valued, not as curiosities, but as good architecture. 

Nigel Warburton
When I lived there I was stunned not only by the views over the Blackwall Tunnel approach road (which, admittedly, is very noisy - more on that later) but over the Thames to Greenwich on one side, and to Tower Bridge and beyond on the other. Sunsets were stunning, and herons often cruised past the window.

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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Lynsey Hanley discusses Nigel Warburton’s description of the Goldfingers' stay in Balfron, declaring that:

'Nigel Warburton's defensive biography of Goldfinger claims that the architect's council-flat soujourn (he only stayed there for two months) wasn't a condescending publicity stunt, but a genuine attempt to show solidarity with his temporary neighbours. I can't help thinking this is gubbins. If he had really wanted to live among the people who had been housed in his creation, would he not have ditched the house in far-away Hampstead and moved full-time to Balfron Tower, with its unbroken views of industrial east London, the docks and the Blackwall tunnel?'

Wow. It's hard to know where to start with this. I'll ignore the 'defensive' and concentrate on the uncontroversial misrepresentations. First, I never gave such a crude description of Goldfinger's motivations for moving into Balfron. I really don't believe that this was an attempt to 'show solidarity with his temporary neighbours' and never suggested that it was. Even though he was a Marxist, that was not his purpose in living in Balfron. I really don't know where Hanley got that idea from. As I say in my biography (Warburton, p.157) this was a wonderful opportunity for Goldfinger to display  his commitment to high-rise living:

'The building might look forebidding from the outside, but, as he hoped to demonstrate, that was completely compatible with well-planned living spaces, with stunning views across London, daylight, heating and all the prerequisites for twentieth-century city living. In what even his critics conceded was at the very least an inspired publicity stunt, he and Ursula [Ursula née Blackwell, his wife] lived for two months in flat 130 on the twenty-sixth floor...'

As I go on to say in the book, living in the space he had created was also completely consistent with his views on the nature of architecture, namely that it is an art of enclosing space - to appreciate any work of architecture you need to experience it from within.  I also acknowledge that to some degree it was a pretext for press attention. Much of his interest in living in Balfron was architectural, though. Goldfinger was an empiricist. He wanted evidence and feedback on what worked and what didn't. I quoted his words on this in my book:

'I want to experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise from my designs so that I can correct them in the future.' (Ernö Goldfinger quoted in Warburton, p.158)

I don't understand how Hanley got from this to notions of wanting to live among the people out of a sense of solidarity. I also point out that:

'He had also often declared that he built homes he would himself be happy to live in' (Warburton, p.158).
…
ADDENDUM 3/2/07
James Dunnett, who worked with Goldfinger on several projects and has written extensively about the architect, emailed me to say:

"I don't think Goldfinger was seeking publicity by going to live in Balfron: it was a serious attempt to assess life there, and Ursula's detailed notes of conversations with neighbours etc are there to prove it. He was an intensely practical man who wanted to know the answers. He never even had the building properly photographed.

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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Another attack from Lynsey Hanley:

'Warburton claims that Goldfinger never gave up his socialist ideals, but if that were the case, why did he consent of working-class people to be housed in such an unprepossessing place?' (Hanley, p.113)

This is where Hanley has definitely lost it: the preceding sentence which apparently glosses  'unprepossessing' is

'There seemed to be something quite wrong about making children live in machines, next to roads clogged with lorries, the acrid smell of riverside industry filling their lungs every day, their noses rubbed into other people's wealth by the gleaming Docklands skyscrapers on their doorstep.' (Hanley, p.113).

Yes, who could disagree? Children shouldn't have to inhale pollution. The allusion to Corbusier's 'machines for living' neglects the fact that Goldfinger's own house in the cleaner environment of Hampstead would also be a 'machine' in these architects' views, so that is a bit of cheap rhetoric...BUT... having been born in 1976 (as Hanley was) is no excuse for the horrific anachronism implied in this quotation. Does she really believe that the Docklands development pre-dated Balfron Tower? If so, she has no credibility whatsoever. Why should anyone take her views on social housing seriously with this level of scholarship? This statement makes me want to give the book to Oxfam, rather than read it. I remember watching Canary Wharf going up level by level from a room in Balfron tower in 1990-1...but Balfron Tower was completed in 1967.

With a degree of magnanimity Hanley concedes 'The architect was not truly to blame for the crime and ignominy that blighted Trellick Tower, in particular in the late 1970s and early 1980s' (Hanley, p.113). But she then goes on to accuse me of letting the architect 'off the hook'...with the snide comment:

'Nevertheless this statement [not obvious what this refers to as no statement is quoted] suggests that there are certain classes of people who can't be trusted to live in any building that was designed by a great man of socialist ideals and spectacular taste in interior design' (Hanley, p.114).

Does it? Well, it is certainly true that some people make better tenants than others...and that is true whatever the social housing in question. It is sentimentality or wishful thinking to believe otherwise. It doesn't matter who built the building, or how spectacular the taste in interior design. The 'great man' thing, where did that come from?

It is interesting that Hanley seems to see me as an unequivocal champion of Goldfinger's tower blocks. But there is much in my biography that expresses reservation and recognises shortcomings. She sneers at my description of Trellick as having nothing quaint or homely about its exterior (but fails to read this in the context of Goldfinger's views about architecture as essentially the art of enclosing space that needs to be experienced from within). I also quote the architect James Dunnett, who worked closely with Goldfinger, on the martial allusions in Trellick's exterior: the slit-windows imparting 'a sense of terror' (Dunnett quoted on p.157 or Warburton). I think it is fair to say that both James Dunnett and I recognise that Balfron Tower is uncompromising and for many people a threatening and unattractive building.

Bizarrely, despite my emphasis on the sublime rather than the beautiful, Hanley writes:

'Both Warburton and Dunnett seem to fall for the idea that housing should be art. It ought to be beautiful, yes, but not at the expense of the people who have to live in it. Or is living in a council flat supposed to be delicately terrifying?' (Hanley, p.114)

No. No. No. Where did she get that idea? Neither of us are that crass. There is a big difference between the experience from within and the experience from outside...But I suspect I have already dignified this rather odd attack with too much blogspace...And now I've looked closely at these three pages, I don't think I'll bother reading the rest. If you feel you'd like to, check out Oxfam bookshop in the next few days.

P.S. Isn't it mysterious that flats in Balfron and Trellick Tower change hands for such high prices these days when they come on the market (e.g. one advertised here for £260,000). They must be such terrible flats to live in. Is this all a con?

Copyright Nigel Warburton

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Aided by mafia-like local authorities, modernist architects built their brave new worlds - at Park Hill in Sheffield, or Ernö Goldfinger’s projects in London’s Camberwell or Poplar. Glamorised visual projections showed happy housewives exchanging the time of day on their disconnected twelfth-floor walkways; the current reality of these shoddy constructions, like the Balfron Tower in Poplar, being condensation stains on concrete, lifts reeking of urine, rotting windows and infestations of crack addicts. 

The Balfron Tower Conservation Area was designated in October 1998 around the two residential blocks designed by Ernö Goldfinger for the London County Council in the 1960s. The Conservation Area boundary protects the listed Balfron Tower and Carradale House, and other buildings in the ‘Brownfield Estate’, including Glenkerry House, a community centre, shops and associated low-rise housing development. 

The 27-storey Balfron Tower is Goldfinger’s first public housing project, and a precursor to his better known Trellick Tower in North Kensington. The neighbouring Carradale House and Glenkerry House sit within the landscaped areas developed at the same time. The Brownfield Estate (also known as the East India Estate) is now recognised as a fine example of planned 1960s social housing. Considered to be exemplary examples of the post-war housing schemes, Balfron Tower and Carradale House were listed in 1998 for their cultural & architectural merit. 

The Balfron Tower Conservation Area mainly consists of the low and high-rise council flats of the Brownfield Estate. It lies to the north-east of Lansbury, the Festival of Britain’s Architectural Exhibition site, which was developed in 1951 following similar clearance. Balfron Tower dominates this landmark development and is representative of the post-war aspirations for good quality public housing. The tower is a significant realisation of many design concepts of the modern movement, expressing the social idealism of the time. 

This is an area of particular special architectural and historic interest, illustrated by its rich history and significant architecture, dating from the 20th century. The character and appearance of the area, as described in this appraisal, define its special qualities.

According to James Dunnett and Gavin Stamp in Works, Goldfinger's distinct achievement in his post-war work is the expression of the frame. Described as having 'a rationalist and industrial conception of the world', Goldfinger had always considered the expression of structure and materials of key importance, as, for example, his earlier Willow Road terraced houses (1938) demonstrate. He used different modelling devices, such as recessed windows and projecting bays, but stopped short of a clear expression of the concrete frame. Other devices - the use of oversized steelwork sections, façades set back from the building line, or the pavement-edge use of large surfaces of plate glass - were all elements that had started to appear in his pre-war projects, for instance in the Abbott toyshop of 1936. Goldfinger also developed a concrete prefabrication system for use on London schools in the 1950s, with a regular grid of portal frames dominating the composition, and his Regents Park Road block of flats (1954) for a housing association had two apartments per floor and was constructed with a concrete frame. Goldfinger was also an advocate of choice, and with two flats per storey the use of a frame structure meant more flexibility in the interior layouts; bedrooms could be allocated to either flat, and tenants could choose between a small kitchen and a living/dining room or a kitchen/dining room and smaller living room. 

Ernö Goldfinger's housing work dates back to the 1920s: his first designs for Philippeville in 1929 were exhibited at the CIAM 1933 conference, and his studies for kitchen designs were published in L'Organistion Menagère in 1928. He also published his design principles in Planning your Home, Planning your Kitchen and Planning your Neighbourhood, as packs of 20 cards. He designed his first daylit 'street-in-the-air' enclosed access corridors for his first local authority housing project, Abbots Langley, in 1956 for Watford Council. Intended to be an improvement on Le Corbusier’s rue intérieure, it gave access on every third floor to a two-person flat and four-person apartments above and below. This nine-storey block, intended to maintain the open space and existing mature trees, was not acceptable to the council and was replaced in the revised built scheme with a four-storey block. The idea was thus not realized until the 1968 Balfron Tower in east London for the London County Council, which was effectively the prototype for the very similar Trellick Tower built in 1972, on the opposite side of the capital. The distinctive element is the lift tower, which is separated from the main block primarily for acoustic reasons and linked with bridges at every third floor level. The concrete surfaces, slit windows and the boiler rooms and chimneys cantilevering out at the top of the tower all contribute to its forbidding, fortress-like appearance. The footprint of both buildings is generally the same, but refinements to the design at Trellick include changes to the external proportions: four more storeys were added and the row of flats with 'pulpit' balconies, which introduces a horizontal break in the regular grid of the façade, was located higher up; the corner flats have windows and balconies on the south, main, façade; and the circulation tower is rotated to appear lighter in contrast to the main block. Refinements in technology included sophisticated electrical installations and double glazing fitted throughout as standard - important because of the nearby railway line. The interiors are spacious compared with other social-housing projects of the period, above the minimum Parker Morris standards in use in Britain at the time. There are two-person, four-person and six-person flats or maisonettes, with most extending the full depth of the block. The exceptionally wide structural bays, at 6.75 metres (22 feet 2 inches) with full-width balconies facing south, make the apartments appear very light, give a feeling of openness and afford spectacular views out.

And then we’re into the final phase, of the big housing for the GLC…there we have it, standing up on its own, before its neighbours were built (which I’ll talk about later) the lift tower pulled apart from the slab block. This is not Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, although there are some similarities, it is the maisonette on two levels which allows you to put in the lift stops and corridors only every third floor. It was a device that was developed in the 1920s, it’s not original, but it’s turned into a very particular expression here that then gets reused at Trellick.

Here you see the buildings around cast shadows, Blackwall Tunnel Approach running across the foreground, this is a place that needs tough architecture and it certainly gets it here, and James [Dunnett] has written very movingly about it. Its castellated defences, second world war gun turret-type qualities, but the flats are pretty nice, and there is one that is quite often available to visit that now belongs to Tower Hamlets Council and they’ve done a very good job, I think, of educating people about this building by means of having this available. 

So there you can see the sort of skip stop corridor arrangement, and each of those flat plans you should read the middle either with the one above or the one below because you go in through the front door, and in some cases you immediately go downstairs and then you’re in the flat, and there are some which are single-storey on each level as well. 

And here, past and present, this bridge, drawbridge over a moat to enter the dark tower. The railway-carriage-profiled links that carry you, slightly precipitously over thin air, before you go into your flat. 

Note the contrast, the gas holders, the chimneys all gone. A changed landscape. Olympic stadia will no doubt loom into place. I mentioned the marble and here you have it. And it’s wonderful and not only the marble the concrete is wonderful as well. With those very warm coloured pebbles in the aggregate.

And this is what happens, you come out of the lift and you go through that door and in the middle picture you go through the railway carriage as it were and then you go into your enclosed corridor, no windswept, rainswept street decks here, it really is too high for that. Glazed towards the tunnel with sealed, double-glazed units from the start. And here, looking out over the landscape from a flat, if you like panoramas this is a good place to be.

But how the building meets the ground is something that architects worry about quite rightly because it is not at all easy to do. And this does it very neatly with the help of a sort of supporting cast of small buildings gathered around the base, not all of which are still there, but there are schemes afoot to try and make it nice, which I’m not sure is the right thing to do at this point in time. I think it wants to be safe, it wants to be useable, but the idea of softening it does seem to me to be the wrong move.

These are the flankers, coming up to what were really the last buildings that were built in this style, providing a sort of chorus of appreciation for the big act that towers up as you see there. It is a wonderful landmark, you really know where you are in East London when you see this, it does matter.

The impact of the global financial downturn is also having an impact on the deliverability of certain aspects of the scheme due to provide the required cross subsidy. Poplar Harca has been looking at alternative solutions and funding models to ensure they are able to achieve the promises made in the offer document. 

The impact of the financial downturn is also having an impact on the deliverability of certain aspects of the scheme due to provide the required cross subsidy. Poplar Harca are currently looking at alternative solutions and funding models to try and achieve the promises made in the offer document. 

The Proposal
The demolition of 30 flats on three sites, and the construction of 144 flats and houses on four sites, including a 20-storey tower, and 150 sq.m of community space, together with associated landscaping. 

Housing and affordable housing 
At consultation stage, the Mayor noted that the development would provide 48.5% affordable housing, which is higher than the Council’s current provision. The tenure mix and variety of dwelling sizes is appropriate. The applicant’s viability assessment is robust, with higher than average exceptional costs required as a result of decanting existing residents across the estate. The proposal complies with Tower Hamlets’ interim housing guidance and emerging core strategy. The additional justification demonstrates that the proposed housing provision is acceptable and will address local need, and GLA officers are satisfied that the maximum potential provision of affordable housing will be provided. 

In response to its consultation, Tower Hamlets received 208 objections from local residents. Objections were made on the basis of: 
Housing: A lack of affordable housing provision, including family provision. 

Additionally, one letter of objection has been sent from a local resident directly to the Mayor. The resident requests that the Mayor consider issues of local affordability, stating that the criteria used by the developer will not help local people (“income will need to be £30,000, while the local average household income is £18,000), and objects to the level of family housing that would be provided within the scheme. 

Housing and affordable housing
London Plan Policy 3A.10 requires borough councils to seek the maximum reasonable amount of affordable housing when negotiating on individual private residential and mixed-use schemes. In doing so, each council should have regard to its own overall target for the amount of affordable housing provision. Policy 3A.9 states that such targets should be based on an assessment of regional and local housing need and a realistic assessment of supply, and should take account of the London Plan strategic target that 35% of housing should be social and 15% intermediate provision, and of the promotion of mixed and balanced communities. In addition, Policy 3A.10 encourages councils to have regard to the need to encourage rather than restrain residential development, and to the individual circumstances of the site. Targets should be applied flexibly, taking account of individual site costs, the availability of public subsidy and other scheme requirements. 

Paragraph 20.3 of the Housing SPG notes that in order for a development to achieve 100% replacement of demolished social rented units, development at significantly increased density may be necessary to generate sufficient value from market development to support replacement of affordable housing provision or to achieve a mixed and balanced community objective. In this instance it is important to note that there will be no net loss of affordable social rented housing. 

Three of the sites contain homes that will be demolished, incorporating 15 rented studio flats, 13 rented one-bedroom units and 2 private one-bed units. The development will provide 48.5% affordable housing (43.9% once demolition is taken into account). This overall figure is higher than the Council’s current provision. There is a high tenure mix across the estate, and although there will only be no net gain or loss of social rent affordable housing, there will be a gain in the number of habitable rooms. The net gain in the number of affordable units will be intermediate tenure (22 units), and this increase is supported by officers. Additional social rented units will be provided in future phases. Officers wish to inspect the scheme’s viability appraisal with regard to the level of affordable housing provision, as well as the wider benefits proposed by the scheme. 

Of the new affordable homes, there will be a tenure split of 60% social rented and 40% intermediate. This split is acceptable and is compliant with the levels recommended within the draft replacement London Plan. 

The proposed dwelling mix is appropriate and responds to local needs. 20 of the 114 units will be four- or five-bedroom homes. A further 23 will be three-bedroom homes. The combined figure of 43 units represents 38% of unit numbers as family homes. 

Housing 
The overarching aspiration for Carradale House with regard to the affordable housing is to provide better quality homes in refurbished accommodation, to bring the dwellings up to “decent homes” standard. These aspirations are supported by PPS3: Housing, which highlights the need to retain and increase the amount of affordable housing across the Country.

Affordable Housing 
Carradale House comprises of 88 dwellings, of which 20 are owned by leaseholders (77% affordable housing overall). The development proposals do not seek to alter any aspect of the tenure of the block and therefore the proposals will not impact upon the amount of affordable housing or the tenure mix which will remain well above the required level of 35% affordable homes which applies to new developments.

Tuesday
to fetch, Hampstead: ironing board, corkscrew, blankets single bed, buy flowers

Saturday
Butcher Wicks on Poplar High St.
Baker Cowells St Leonards Rd
Fishmonger Chrisp St Market
Delicatessen
Fruit far end of Chrisp St Market

Wednesday
4.45 hairdresser
TV delivered
Shirley’s party

Thursday
Opening ceremony, cleaning, washing etc
Woman in lift said difficulty in cleaning windows, had to take down curtains… owing to glass being too near window frame

Friday
East wind blows through balcony and front door, makes laundry and stairs very cold

Entrance
The walk from the road to the entrance is pleasant and easy with prams etc. I have never heard a comment on it. Personally I like it, I find it a definite advantage to be able to walk to the launderette in Commercial Road and to the market on pedestrian ways. With a pram or children I would have considered this an even greater advantage.

Entrance Doors
Heavy and difficult to manage with prams and children especially in SW gale, doorhandles dismounted by hooligans on one occasion. Entrance hall adequate in size and agreeable.

Lifts
Very good when both are running and very bad if one out of action (quite frequent). Especially if people were moving in at the same time. Sufficiently large even with very large pram but if there was a large pram at the back by the time the mother had manoeuvred out, other people having to leave the lift for her to do so, the lift was liable to disappear before one could get in again. Definitely a larger lift where someone could hold the stop button while it was loading would be better.

The bridges
The swinging doors are extremely difficult to manage with parcels, more so with a pram. A single door that swings in both directions would be easier. I have noticed without exaggeration that everyone was helpful with the doors, not just to me but with each other or a child, or anyone at all. This applies to all age groups including teenagers. There is a very high spirit of courtesy.

Outside corridor
This is appallingly cold in an East wind. It is well kept, I have never seen rubbish in it at any time of day.Milk bottles are left outside doors all day as people are at work, never turned over or broken. some people have door mats outside. I have not yet heard that one has been stolen. This happened to me and friends of mine in Hampstead.

Flat entrance doors
The grilles above the doors let in a terrible amount of cold in an East wind, also under the doors. I believe most tenants have blocked the grilles up, I certainly would if I lived here permanently. In our flat the cold air did not rise to the first floor, but I think that particularly in the small flats it is very bad.

Flat entrance
Very good for size, possible to stand a small pram near the coats, coat hooks very useful. (Some difficulty in flats with stairs going down to flats.)

Staircase
Easy to go up or down. I hate the cement risers which are not possible to clean and look shoddy and tenement like. I should paint them a dark colour if I lived here, but I think they gave quite disappointing effect to the tenants as they moved in, quite out of character with the rest of the flat. The white rubber noses I found a nuisance to keep clean.

Living Room
Very good. I found it easy to feed six one end and seat six in easy chairs the other end very comfortably, the room kept warm easily I never heard a criticism of them. Everybody liked the balconies. The view when sitting in ours was obstructed by the window boxes, this did not worry me personally. I should like tiles on the balconies as it would be easier to keep clean, now it does not matter so much, in the summer one would bring a lot of dust into the sitting room from it. I saw one flat had lain linoleum on the balcony (flowered), everyone seems to be looking forward to planting their window boxes and these would look extremely attractive. The soil in the window boxes and these would look extremely attractive. The soil in the window boxes looks bad to me. I think the GLC might get out a leaflet on window box cultivation as most people have never planted anything in their lives and they might get discouraged. It might be an idea to have a window box competition or an attractive balcony competition. The only two criticism I have heard of the balconies was: a) rather small as it would only take 6 chairs! b) it should be netted in completely for children (I have heard that small children love playing on the balconies and don’t want to go out!)

Complaints from tenants
I have heard many people who live low down say they would like a flat higher up. I have heard no tenant who lives high up say they would like a flat lower down.

I have talked to a number of tenants mainly in the lift or walking to the shop. Bar the complaints of draughts from some windows, heating that didn’t work, they all said the flats were lovely. Those I have been into are beautifully kept, people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments, though I don’t think the designs of fabrics are much worse than those I see at the Design Centre. I have never heard anybody express regret for the terrace houses they have mostly come from.

Teenagers
Personally I think there is surprisingly little hooliganism considered the building is open to all corners. Maybe it is worse in the school holidays. The small children enjoy the bear pit, all ages get pleasure from rolling down the grass slopes. All ages like climbing up anything climbable.

As part of my MA research I spent several hours trawling through these documents, getting lost in duped flat layouts, corridors, concrete details and different garden layouts. I was particularly interested in box 170, which contained a folder titled ’Publicity’.

In this is a copy of the journal East London Papers (summer 1969) in which Goldfinger wrote an article about Balfron Tower, summing up his observations from the well publicised two months he and his wife Ursula spent living in a top floor flat in the spring of 1968 (immediately after the building opened). There is also a red Silvine exercise book, containing scrawled notes in black and red biro. The handwriting veers wildly off the lines, much is illegible and there are many crossings out. it is Ursula’s diary of their stay.
…
At the back there is a series of notes written towards the end of their stay. Based on her experience, observations and conversations with other residents, Ursula considers the day to day use of the building - how does one open the doors if carrying parcels or pushing a pram, how easy is it to use the lifts, which spaces are draughty, how easy is it to keep the balcony clean.
…
Ursula writes succinctly and pragmatically. She criticises and praises family, paying particular attention to the east of movement through the building. The overall feeling one gets is of great support for this huge experimental building that her husband has built, and of absolute conviction that they should learn as much as they can from it. Their stay in the tower was often criticised, dismissed as a cheap publicity stunt. Goldfinger certainly was a larger than life character, and not averse to a bit of publicity, but these notes indicate that there was more to their stay than the critics wanted to believe.

5.1 BEFORE THE WORKS
This is the period when residents are informed about improvement plans. It is a time of anticipation, delay and worry. The resident maybe living in a poor physical environment that may be cold, damp and unsafe; they may be disabled and awaiting housing adaptations. The resident may be offered choices about the design of fixtures and fittings and be consulted about other potential home improvements.

Whole house and high-rise refurbishments typically involve relocation of existing residents during the period of improvements (decanting). Relocation can either be temporary, while homes are refurbished, or permanent. Relocation may be voluntary or compulsory. Residents moved to unfamiliar locations with unfamiliar neighbours can contribute towards anxiety, uncertainty and fear. Compulsory relocation has potentially far greater negative health impacts.

Residential relocation process

• Develop a clear, coherent residential relocation strategy for whole house and high-rise refurbishments and new build.
• Define open, transparent and equitable housing relocation systems and processes.
• Make the strategy publicly accessible through a Website.
• Involve tenants in the development of the strategy.

In Elliott Lester’s hackneyed crime thriller, Balfron Tower stars as the home of Blitz, a strutting psychotic serial killer who murders members of the police force. His flat is visited then raided by maverick Detective Sergeant Brant, played by a typically gruff and needlessly violent Jason Statham, and Sergeant Nash, his by-the-book sidekick played by Paddy Consindine. This is an invariably frightening and grimy London and, although flooded with light, Blitz’ scruffy flat appears a drab sepia hue behind worn net curtains.

Colin's Pics, London: Balfron Tower
Balfron Tower and its bigger brother, Trellick Tower, are instantly recognisable by the signature "service towers" linked by walkways to the main blocks at every third floor. The walkways suggest that there's a scheme here to make individual flats span more than one floor in the main block, and presumably their front doors all share communal "streets in the sky". But why make the service tower separate? Why make the whole lot so high and thin that it looks as if it might fall over? Why those narrow little windows? Why make the place look so bleak and threatening? And why on earth are these two towers now listed buildings, with their flats selling from £250K to £500K?
…
I fear even the name "Balfron" sounds cold and alien. Is it an association with the Balrog, a nasty beast from Lord of the Rings? Or is planet Balfron home to an evil galactic empire? Perhaps it's an evil multinational corporation (or am I thinking of Grundon?) Then again, it could be some strange sub-nuclear particle like a boson or a gluon. The "Higgs Balfron..."
…
Human "circulation" here, even at "ground" level, is pushed up into the air on miserable concrete walkways. On the good side this allows for traffic and other services to run underneath, away from the pedestrians - but the walkways also have the unfortunate effect of making you feel like a marble, or a rat. These towers were originally completely open to the outside world, and completely unsupervised - so they were an absolute gift for muggers, rapists, gangs, drug abusers, vandals, vagrants...
…
And finally - the view. I stood in flat 123 and simply boggled. Everything you could want to see is beautifully laid out in front of you - it's not just a screwed-up view of parts of London, but the whole lot, laid out tidily in all its local clumpiness. A fantastic view of the city itself, with the Gherkin, Tower 42 and Heron Tower nicely spaced, and Lloyds and St Paul's too if you look carefully; then you turn to the left, where Guy's and the Shard rise up tidily just to the right of my old flat at 100 Westminster Bridge Road and just left of Big Ben and the Eye. Turn a little more, and all of Canary Wharf is there before you. And all so close you could almost touch it!  I'm not proud of my next thought, but I found myself wondering - how come such a fantastic view has been wasted on the working classes and the destitute...or to put it another way, why have these people not had their lives immeasurably improved by living with this fantastic view?

The Brownfield area includes around 800 homes. The freehold of the 669 of these (463 tenanted, 206 leasehold) are owned by Poplar HARCA. The remaining are generally independent freehold houses. 

The strength of the Brownfield community lies in its longevity and its adaptability. There are numerous individuals and families who have long local lineages, stretching back several generations with personal histories bonded with their sense of place. Equally, there is a generally accepting and embracing attitude to the changing nature of the community, which has included cultural and growingly, socio-economic shifts. There is a notable fear in some quarters around 'gentrification' and loss of identity through a large influx of new and different residents.

Building of the month, Twentieth Century Society, Laura Chan
Having lived in Balfron myself in 2010, I know all too well the downsides of living in a 1960s concrete high-rise: cockroaches live behind the concrete panels; the complex water system means you never quite know where the leak in the toilet is coming from; when both lifts break down there’s a long walk ahead of you. Maintenance issues aside, it was an absolute joy to live on the twenty-first floor of the magnificent Balfron.  From this height, London was in the cup of my hands, my eye-line at the same level as the horizon.

Social Cleansing in Tower Hamlets: Interview with Balfron Tower Evictee, Novaramedia
We get to talking about the changes the area has seen in the last few years. The flats in the Balfron Tower, once emptied but prior to their refurbishment, have been used to host “artists’ live/work studios” by Bow Arts, but are also being farmed out to ‘property guardians’, and, lately, being used as temporary accommodation for homeless from outside of Tower Hamlets. “But more than Bow Arts, in my block is guardians. And that’s like basically paying to squat. You get no rights, you get a work contract. And there’s absolutely loads of them. People hate them, but I think that they’re just in the same position as everyone else. Why would you want to live like that? And you can be out in 24 hours. There was a guy in my block who was a guardian, and someone complained he had his music too loud, and he got a 24 hour notice the next day. So living like that, they don’t care about the block, and I don’t blame them either, you’re not going to put down roots in the community.”

SITE NAME: Balfron Tower E14
DESIGNATION: Conservation Area, 2 LBs
CONDITION: Very bad
VULNERABILITY: Medium
NEW ENTRY?: No
TREND: Improving

Oliver Wainwright, Wayne Hemingway's 'pop-up' plan sounds the death knell for the legendary Balfron Tower, The Guardian
Built as a beacon of social housing in 1968, this heroic 27-storey bookend to east London has been “decanted” of its social tenants over the last few years, to allow it to be scrubbed up and transformed into a silo of luxury flats – which will be marketed to the bankers of nearby Canary Wharf. The proceeds will go towards building low-rise social housing units nearby, in the shadow of the tower’s great heft.

The process began in 2008, and the interim period has been characterised by the usual medley of arts-led temporary uses, to distract from the sore of a vast concrete carcass lying empty. Well-meaning local arts organisation, the Bow Arts Trust, has supplied a ready flow of artists eager to fill the flats on short-term tenancies as they have been vacated, while property guardianship company, Dot Dot Dot, has filled a similar number of flats with its guardians. They pay for the pleasure of providing security, with none of the rights of being a tenant – but for the chance to live in a grade II-listed brutalist masterpiece, it’s a compromise many are willing to make.

Municipal Dreams, Balfron Tower, Poplar: imparting ‘a delicate sense of terror’
Balfron Tower is now one of the stately homes of England – a National Trust attraction no less.  Recently it’s hosted an arts season, a Shakespeare play, and it’s provided live-work accommodation for twenty-five artists since 2008.  And all that, to be honest, makes me sad because once Balfron was simply housing for the local people who needed it – although its size and style and big name architect did always get it special attention.

Municipal Dreams, Balfron Tower, Poplar: ‘they all said the flats were lovely’
It’s a cruel irony that Balfron Tower, conceived in the twentieth century as decent housing for ordinary people, will in the twenty-first become the preserve solely of the most wealthy.
…
In the meantime, as Balfron has emptied (one or two families are still holding out), its flats have been let out to property guardians and artists.  This brings in a little income, it provides a little security but it’s hard not to see all of them as an insidious gentrifying vanguard – embedded agents of regeneration, in the words of one critical participant.

Ian Martin: My ten favourite bits of London, Architects’ Journal
8. Balfron Tower
The scruffy version of Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. I used to know someone who lived there and it was a pretty frightening place to visit. I’m sure it’s got a Trellick-level hipster quotient now. To be honest, it’s seeing it on the skyline I like most. Still so shocking and futuristic. Also, it was designed for and built by the GLC, in the days when more than half the architectural profession was in public service. What a monument to those days of a thriving public sector.

Sam Jacob, ‘Exploring a century of ideas about housing with the AA Night School’, Architects’ Journal
Winding through the low-rise streets of the Lansbury Estate, we come to the majestic slab of the Balfron Tower, Erno Goldfinger’s pixelated cliff-face that stands as an East-End mirror to his Trellick Tower in the west, together book-ending the city like stately concrete robots. It contains a stack of 136 flats and 10 maisonettes, these two-storey units articulated on the 16th floor as a horizontal ribbon, like a distinctive cummerbund around the building’s portly girth.

When the tower opened in 1967 Goldfinger himself moved in for two months, holding champagne-fuelled soirées at the top of the building, like Ballard’s doomed architect in High Rise. Built as social housing by the GLC, the democratic vision is now coming to an equally sticky end: the Balfron is soon to be scrubbed up by Studio Egret West and sold off as high-end private flats.

Examples of our success in maximising the return on our assets:
Converting the Grade 2 listed Balfron Tower from a social rented block to all private sales. The red book valuation of Balfron Tower using EUV–SH is negative (£4,030,000). By changing the tenure to private sale we anticipate that the project will generate a positive NPV and reduce financial risk for Poplar HARCA.

The five hour show sees Balfron converted into the tower of Macbeth’s castle set in 1970s Eastern Europe in which an audience journey from the car park, where the witches are gathered around a fire, to the intimacy of flats, specially created bars and a banqueting hall, where they feast with the Macbeths before being sent back to sleep until dawn.

And yet Balfron Tower is a firm part of the nation’s heritage. Completed in 1968, its place in the architectural pantheon was established as early as 1996, with a Grade II listing from English Heritage. The Tower also stands as testament to a particular historical moment; when a vision of a utopian post-war Britain, coincided with an architectural movement, Brutalism, and a material, concrete, that indelibly changed the landscape of our urban environment. Love it or loathe it, this was intended to be a heroic architecture that offered the best of design to the masses, freed people from condemned slum housing, and elevated them – literally – to a better life. Balfron Tower is the welfare state in concrete. It deserves, nay demands, our attention. 
...
The word iconic is over-used, but history has already judged Balfron Tower an icon, for good or ill, of a moment in time marked by utopian visions and their dystopian outcomes. Five decades later, though many Brutalist blocks have already fallen to the wrecking ball of progress, it is now time to cherish and care for these buildings anew, in the way that Goldfinger and his fellow visionaries first envisaged. 
...
While a number of his buildings have been demolished, Ernö’s gloomy prediction on his eightieth birthday did not come to pass at Poplar. A renewed interest in his architecture by heritage bodies, architects, artists and designers have ensured, if not quite a glorious legacy, distinguished endurance at least. Balfron Tower was Grade II listed in 1996, and, with its surrounds, was designated a Conservation Area two years later. Perhaps a building ahead of its time had finally caught up with itself. 
...
As the architect Kate Macintosh points out, large buildings show us where power lies. From the church to the aristocracy to business today, for a brief moment it was social housing that ‘deserved’ the biggest, most striking architecture. It might be ironic, or perhaps entirely appropriate, that Balfron Tower now affords some of the best views of Canary Wharf. Either way, it is to our great privilege that such a time existed, and that it afforded this maverick Hungarian émigré the chance to make his radical mark on the East London skyline.

Request 
I would like to know the number of leasehold units, and the number of units housing secure tenants in the Balfron Tower, during November 2007, prior to its transfer to Poplar HARCA and subsequent decanting. 

Response 
On the day before the transfer on 29 November 2007 there were the following numbers of leaseholders, tenants and void properties in the building (which comprises of 146 separate properties): 
1. Leaseholders–36 
2. Secure tenants–99 
3. Void properties–11 

Request 
I would like to know the number of leasehold units, and the number of units housing secure tenants in the Balfron Tower, during November 2007, prior to its transfer to Poplar HARCA and subsequent decanting. 

Response 
On the day before the transfer on 29 November 2007 there were the following numbers of leaseholders, tenants and void properties in the building (which comprises of 146 separate properties): 
1. Leaseholders–36 
2. Secure tenants–99 
3. Void properties–11 

Converting the Grade 2 listed Balfron Tower from a social rented block to all private sales. The red book valuation of Balfron Tower using EUV–SH is negative (£4,030,000). By changing the tenure to private sale we anticipate that the project will generate a positive NPV and reduce financial risk for Poplar HARCA. 

To approach the main entrance from the west along the very direct path is to experience an exciting spatial sensation as one moves across the highly modelled 'green' ground plane, first alongside a ravine (the sunken service road), then across a bridge, past a ‘gatehouse’, and finally across what feels like a drawbridge under surveillance from arrays of gun-slots above, before entering the 'castle' - or tower - itself. The exposed aggregate surface of most external walls, though softened by radius corners, adds to the 'castle-like air’. From these, project gargoyles. The lift lobby is unexpectedly tall - like all those above, it is a storey-and-a-half high - and well appointed: it is lined with green marble, mostly still intact, and would have been well-lit originally when the entrance doors were plate glass - long since replaced with a heavy timber screen and door controlled by entry phone. The lift arrives promptly enough and one emerges into an upper lift lobby, equally lofty but this time with no marble and lit by an array of slit windows (the 'gun slots') in two staggered rows – vertically pivoted so that they can be opened for cleaning from inside (but evidently never are) without allowing an opening wide enough to fall out. From there another bridge leads across the vertiginous gulf between the circulation tower and the main block, with deep windows on either side, and through two pairs of swing doors (many of the original with moulded timber door handles survive), and into the access gallery.

Scarcely credible, these galleries were originally open, albeit with parapets about 1750mm high, so the quarry-tiled floor undulates slightly to create falls for drainage. Natural light streams in, lighting up the brightly-coloured tiles covering the walls opposite, punctuated by doors to three flats per structural bay, and by the kitchen windows of the two-person flats on the same level. These walls advance and recede, avoiding the oppressiveness of a corridor – very different from the blank and flat walls of the ‘streets in the air’ at Park Hill in Sheffield. Once inside the flat, the breathtaking panorama of London unfolds before you.

This was the spatial sequence I experienced every day for a week. Once inside the flat - in my case on the 24th floor - the sky dominates the view in both directions. This is as expected by the Modern Movement, but perhaps not the noise: the hope was that by building tall away from roads the noise of traffic would be lost. But the traffic approaching the Blackwall tunnel towards the south crossed by that on the East India Dock Road, right next to Balfron, is more than enough to fill the air with sound at the highest level. From the generous balcony this is noticeable and would perhaps be so within the fat with the windows open, but with them closed in October it was acceptable. Visually the sense of spatial intoxication was for me real and was heightened by the feeling that one was in touch with that space. That one could open the windows and go out onto the balcony, where pigeons could land on the planters and even squirrels run along them, and also by the shallow depth of the wide-frontage flats bringing intense light from both sides right into the centre. The drama of the changing sky was a constant source of wonder. Storms would move across and the buildings of the City visible to the west were illuminated pink by the rising sun in the morning and silhouetted dark against a pink sky in the evening.

Balfron Tower, long referred to as the 'lesser known', 'smaller' or 'earlier' version of Goldfinger's similar Trellick Tower, has this year been getting all the publicity.  The most obvious reason is that the tower (27 storeys with 146 dwellings completed in 1968, the first phase of Goldfinger’s work on the LCC's Brownfield Estate in Poplar, East London is being emptied by its housing association owners Poplar HARCA for sale to private developers.  While this lengthy process is going on, 40 vacated flats have been made available to the Bow Arts Trust for letting on short tenure to artists as live-work units (as well as numbers of flats to other organisations), with the result that there has been burgeoning artistic activity there over the last three years. It culminated this year in the so-called Balfron Season of events, exhibitions, happenings - even overnight performances of Macbeth -, and the involvement of the British Council, the Royal College of Art, and the National Trust.  The Trust, already owners of Goldfinger's former house in Willow Road, Hampstead, were invited to open a 'pop up property’ in the flat on the top floor at the south end of the block that Erno Goldfinger with his wife Ursula famously occupied for two months in 1968 to monitor his own work for real. Indicative though all this is of interest in Goldfinger's work, it leaves unanswered some of the fundamental questions about Balfron.

In the only contemporary publication of it, in Architecture d'Aujourd'hui (Feb-March 1967), notes in its short text that the architects ‘adopted a policy of building tall (the principal building has 27 storeys) in order to leave a large part of the site free’. This must have been written by Goldfinger himself since, as the London correspondent for that magazine, he was responsible for sending all the material published about projects in Britain. The idea that space, and especially green space, was a fundamental benefit as a setting for human habitation was fundamental to the Modern Movement in architecture. It reflected the view that 'space' was a critical element in architecture and urbanism – ‘Light, Space, Greenery’ was the slogan Le Corbusier attached to his Radiant City. But it is an ideal that has been questioned, or more exactly, rejected for at least the last fifty years.

Londonewcastle goes for gold in east London, Hannah Brenton
“We feel it’s a piece of modern brutalism that will hopefully be referred back to as to how an iconic building like this, which is dilapidated and deteriorating quite badly, should be moved forward into the future,” 

Londonewcastle chief operating officer Robert Soning said in an exclusive interview with Property Week.

“We’re massive fans of Goldfinger — we love what he tried to achieve, which are effectively communities in the sky. We felt that from an architectural point of view that era [the 1960s] was a concrete disaster — but out of this grew some real gems.”

Benjamin Mortimer, How the Balfron Tower tenants were ‘decanted’ and lost their homes, East End Review

Last month’s announcement that the Grade II-listed Balfron Tower in Poplar will no longer contain any social housing but will instead be sold as luxury flats put an end to speculation about its future that has been going on since 2010. But questions remain about its recent past, particularly around how more than 120 family-sized East London flats have passed from the social to the private sector without anyone being evicted.

For the better part of five years, Poplar HARCA, the housing association which owns the block, has maintained that the people who used to live there – social tenants who were “decanted” to allow refurbishment work to be carried out – might in theory be permitted to move back in. It stated several times that they “possibly but not probably” had a “right of return”.

This “right” wasn’t about law but about money: whether Poplar HARCA could afford to have any social housing in Balfron Tower. Until recently it was still unsure. In an interview conducted in January, Paul Augarde, head of Creativity and Innovation at Poplar HARCA, insisted he still did not know whether or not the budget for the Balfron project would have space for some social tenants to move back in. “It’s never great,” he said of what was then the possible total sale. “You don’t want to sell stuff.”

In 2006, residents were sent a booklet about transferring to Poplar HARCA, two pages of which were of special relevance to Balfron and Carradale. Poplar HARCA would be contractually obliged to refurbish substantially both blocks, and two options for their tenants were proposed: they could remain living in their flats while the refurbishment was carried out, or they could move, as priority tenants, into new homes Poplar HARCA would build elsewhere on the Brownfield Estate. If they took the second option, their current flat would be sold privately to help pay for the project.

Poplar HARCA anticipated around 130 tenants from across both blocks would choose to leave in this first instance. Balfron had suffered from an historic lack of maintenance and anti-social behaviour was a serious problem. Many tenants took Poplar HARCA up on its offer; but many others opted to stay.

In other words, the sale of some flats in Balfron was always on the cards, but so was the prospect of social tenants continuing to live there indefinitely. This initial proposal, on which tenants voted, made no mention of a “decant”, permanent or temporary, nor indeed of any need to leave Balfron at all.

Poplar HARCA blames two things: the 2008 financial crisis and the refusal of planning permission for a “linked” proposal for several separate developments it submitted to Tower Hamlets Council. Approval of this proposal would have given it a solid financial resource and lowered its reliance on the sale of unwanted Balfron and Carradale flats to fund the refurbishment and other projects. Forced to apply for new developments site by site, and sell homes at post-crash prices, these flats became one of its few solid sources of money.

Since these events occurred, tenants have been “decanted” and the uncertainty of their “possible but not probable” return promulgated. If – from 2008 onwards – Poplar HARCA strongly suspected it would need to sell Balfron, why didn’t it just make a clean breast of it?

Paul Augarde argues it was simply communicating the truth of the situation, which was that Poplar HARCA did not know what was going to happen. “We were very straight,” he says. “If we’d given an absolute answer” to residents’ questions on returning, he says, “it would have been no. It would have been easier to say no.”

Poplar HARCA did not attribute the need to remove tenants in 2010 to the need to sell Balfron, instead citing a report which detailed safety risks to their remaining while work was carried out. It decided on this basis to “decant” all tenants. This makes sense – quite how people could remain in flats while their bathrooms and kitchens were renovated has never entirely been made clear. But the “decant” also meant that the sale of homes would from then on always be connected to the prospect of tenants moving back in, not to their being moved out. The question of the sale of homes would be framed around a “right of return”, not a “right to stay”.

This was the manner in which the issue was presented to tenants, who were briefed by Poplar HARCA at the end of September 2010 on the need to leave their homes. The briefing could have been clearer: “Up until reading about the process of decanting I thought we were going to temporary housing and then return,” says Michael Newman, a tenant of Balfron for many years. Printed communications, however, boded ill: “The document that I looked at was on the process of decanting, and it made no statement that I could find on returning.”

The omission caused such alarm that by October it was the subject of an FAQ on a fact-sheet distributed by Poplar HARCA. “Can I move back in when the works are complete?” was “one of the questions we just don’t know the answer to yet”, the sheet stated, before raising the prospect of selling more Balfron flats than originally intended: “We have had to re-think how we pay for the works.”

In November 2010, Newman wrote an eloquent and moving letter to Andrea Baker, Director of Housing at Poplar HARCA, asking if there had been a misunderstanding: “[I] see my flat, my home, as a safe haven with memories of my brothers, and an inspirational, poetic view that has helped me through very difficult times,” he wrote. “I have lived for the past few weeks with the worry of losing my home.

“I am writing to ask you to reassure me about my home and our community.” Baker wrote back the very next day. But she was unable to offer anything further by way of reassurance than the “possibly but not probably have a right of return” formulation.

From 2010, Poplar HARCA worked with residents on relocating. Building work was (and still is) yet to start. As years went by, the realistic option for waiting residents was to cease to pursue even a moral “right of return”.

“I have been treated very well by HARCA in the decant and do feel gratitude for how they supported the move,” says Michael Newman now. He has resettled in Carradale House. “I am now happy where I live. I can see my old flat from the balcony of my new one, and I am starting a new life.”

So is Balfron Tower. Now that all tenants have been re-housed, physically and psychologically, Poplar HARCA has finally applied for planning permission for the refurbishment and has formed a partnership with developer London Newcastle to sell the flats.

What comes of all this? It’s astonishing that a social landlord started with the plan of refurbishing a listed building for its social tenants and found that it was able to do so only if it sold the building into private hands – while still being contractually obliged to carry out the work. Other housing associations may well be put off by this from pursuing such ambitious projects, and it is a shame, to say the very least, that Poplar HARCA, for all its achievements, could not set them a better example.