Mike Brooke, First bricks laid to regenerate Poplar’s once-troubled Brownfield Estate, East London Advertiser
It takes more than just a few bricks to regenerate a troubled neighbourhood in London’s East End once plagued by yobs in the street.

But the bricks are enough to start the process on Poplar’s Brownfield housing estate.

The first few were laid by Poplar Harca housing and regeneration association as construction for 23 new affordable family homes got under way last week to replace the old Builders Arms pub and a block of bedsits linked to anti-social behaviour in the past.

The association’s development director Neal Hunt said: “These new family homes will help address the severe overcrowding problem in Poplar and create a safe space for families when they’re ready next year.”

The Telford development includes eight two-bed flats, 10 four-bed maisonettes and five wheelchair accessible flats, part of a wider regeneration programme for around 170 new homes as well as refurbishment of older properties and new youth and community services on the estate.

 

Colin's Pics, London: Balfron Tower
Ah, the 1960s. When concrete was king, tower blocks were the future, and "brutalism" was still a good word. Twenty years earlier, Le Corbusier had laid out the vision of a concrete future in the sky - and now new building techniques seemed to offer the chance to realise it at low cost and in double-quick time. Faced with an urgent need for 4 million new homes, Britain leapt at the opportunity - with many of our architects and engineers genuinely thinking they were midwifing us into a better world. The more far-sighted of them knew it wouldn't be entirely a simple job, but one thing was taken for granted: once you provided good architecture people would live good lives in it, and we'd all benefit.

So how come it all went so wrong? It certainly didn't help that the councils who commissioned these properties were often very difficult clients, demanding impossible results from low budgets and failing to understand the riskiness inherent in working with new materials and untried processes. And the architects did get things wrong: they were guilty of a naive and often arrogant belief that people would "live well" in their buildings; they failed to plan-out the opportunities for mischief, crime and decay which seem so obvious in hindsight; they completely mis-managed the issues of cold, and dampness, and smelly waste, which hang around human existence; and they also made the awful error of assuming energy would be always be plentiful and cheap.

At a less tangible level, those who built these places also misunderstood just how dull and basic most people's lives are. It's one thing for architects' drawings to show perfect people living ideal lives in their beautiful white boxes; but actually most of us don't know how to live these perfect lives even if we could. Mess, smell, noise, clutter; pressures of time and money; stress at work and in our families; and the horror of other people - all these factors and many more conspire against us living the gorgeous lives the architects design for us. It's probably a myth that Geordies, when provided with indoor facilities, "kept their coal in the bath" - but the fundamental principle is there: human life is messy, and the environment itself is complex, so without constant attention to maintenance and management even the best Le Corbusier scheme will tend to go downhill. And once started on the slide, it's hard to stop the decline.

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?

The architect of both Balfron and Trellick Towers was Erno Goldfinger, who we've met elsewhere as the designer and owner of 2 Willow Road, and whose approach to his buildings is well enough documented that it's a great help in understanding what's going on here. Goldfinger was a Jewish refugee from Hungary, 6' 6" tall and a powerful man, married to an heiress, and a Marxist to boot: precisely the sort of person to have strong and arrogant views about how to reorganise society and how individuals should live in his buildings. The Wikipedia article on Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower are good introductions, and if you google either of the buildings a load of stuff comes back. But even more helpful when I visited Balfron Tower was to have the original chief structural engineer on hand to show us round. His insights, his stories, and his explanations of both the good and the bad were just fascinating - not least of which was the observation that at one point Goldfinger had fallen out with his client to such an extent that "he wouldn't speak to anyone from the Council."

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..."

The name is actually taken from an innocuous village in Scotland, matching everything else on this Scottish-themed estate (Carradale and Glenkerry Houses are next door). But even so...why not a nice recognisable name like Stirling or Aberdeen? Add to that 40 years of rusty rain bouncing up against miserable concrete and it really could be the title sequence of a horror movie.

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...

It's mildly surprising that the letters have never been hacked off the wall, or that they haven't simply fallen off in the usual manner. Presumably this has something to do with them being hard to reach, though I think it also tells us something good about Goldfinger and his team: on the whole they did build these places to last, which is why we can say that apart from the surface scum and the surrounding walkways the main blocks are basically sound, solid buildings.

Our structural engineer was very keen to tell us the main buildings here are not system-built - i.e. a load of blocks made up somewhere else and then held together with just a few rusty bolts. By contrast they were made with concrete poured in situ, with metal reinforcement and "formers" constructed in place to shape it. The walkways are pre-cast, which is why they look a bit blocky - but look carefully at the main towers of flats and, although they have lines where the concrete-work paused after a day's work, they do indeed lack that "kit of parts bolted together" look. The concrete looks as if it was made here rather than carted in as blocks from somewhere else, and since it's not just held together with a few rusty bolts, it might just hold together in the long term.

And so...up to those walkways. One of the criticisms of early tower blocks was that although people got to meet others who lived on the same floor, their never met the people who lived above and below them. There was also a feeling that although the block itself saved ground space by piling people up in the sky, there was still a lot of valuable floor space wasted internally with communal halls which didn't at the end of the day, get used very much - after all, a hall with only 6 flats off it isn't ever going to be very busy.
One way to deal with this is a bit of a paradox - you create multi-story flats, where everyone's front doors are on the same level but internally the flats go up, down, and all around each other. On the Byker Wall in Newcastle Ralph Erskine did this with a simple one-up, one-down approach:

Which approach is better? Both architects found these layouts allowed the "main floor" to run from front to back through the building, giving plenty of scope for light and air; and obviously you can make the flats as big or small as you like, so there's no real competition on grounds of size or number of bedrooms. A downside is that most flats have to have internal staircases, which seems a bit counter-intuitive - though people seem to cope.

Goldfinger's arrangement allows for a bit more variation in family size, but I think I prefer Erskine's on the ground that it has people actually living at walkway level - and therefore looking out of their windows, waving to their neighbours, etc etc. Goldfinger by contrast forces people off to the upper or lower floors, so although they occasionally meet their neighbours on the walkways they don't naturally see them out of their windows. On the other hand, I bet people in Byker get sick of running up and down stairs all the time. But the difference is a minor point, and given the preference nowadays to have walkways running internally through thicker buildings rather than being hung on the outside, other possibilities come into play.

The walkways themselves are functional but uninspiring. The views from up there could be spectacular if you didn't have to allow for vertigo, bad weather and suicidal urges brought on by living here...but when you add "wired glass", "tight little spaces", and "little windows which you annoyingly can't reach up to see through" it all ends up a lot less appealing. The walkways are also the only "system-built" part of the building, and they certainly look it - they're not in any danger of falling off, but compared with the main structures they do have a "bolted-on" look. (By this point our structural engineer was in his element, talking about corbels and phosphor-bronze bolts, and generally pretty happy with how things had lasted over 40 years. Not so happy, though, with the way the ceilings and the lighting on his walkways had been messed with.)

The rat-run feel of the walkways reaches a strange climax on neighbouring Carradale House, where a twist in the design requires a little drop-down staircase in order to reach some of the flats. Is this a marvellous attempt to "personalise" the experience, encouraging the individual to celebrate their own little staircase as they climb out every morning to go to their dull job? Or is it simply an expensive-but-nasty wrinkle to cover the fact that the architect couldn't be bothered to design things better, which forever after leaves the tenant feeling like a rat in a maze? I can't say I fancy it.

And what of those funny little slitty windows, presumably echoing the form of a staircase inside the service towers? Goldfinger's idea was that they should be like the slit windows in a Norman castle keep - which is all very well, but it seems a rather irrelevant historic reference.

In the event, some of these slits are yet more windows at the wrong height to look out of; and even those that are at the right height are filled with thick wired glass which seems to be turning itself opaque just out of spite. It's hard to express just how annoying it is to have a window that you can't look out of.

And meanwhile, since we're in the service tower, here are the services. Originally the door on the left led to a communal laundry room - the generous assumption being that the tenants wouldn't all have washing machines, so communal facilities should be provided. But can you really imagine 20 families sharing one laundry room? The rooms quickly turned nasty, and now they just sit empty.

The room on the right, on the other hand, is still used - but is hideously smelly since it houses the rubbish chute. Why is it that communal rubbish chutes have to be so vile? Is it that the insides of the chute get smeared with rubbish? Or is it that the bin at the bottom just fumes with stink and it rises up the chute? Is it that lots of people don't wrap their rubbish carefully? Or is it just inevitable that even the best-wrapped rubbish, if chucked down 20 floors over 40 years, will end up smeared all over everywhere? Whatever it is...they're going to have to do something better than this before the middle classes will want to live here.

So finally we made it up to the flats, where we were kindly hosted by members of the Bow Artists Group. These nice young people are allowed to live in the flats on a slightly cheap rent which also subsidises the Group's activities - and in return they're encouraged to let people like me invade their spaces. They were, of course, perfectly charming, essentially middle-class and surrounded by books and the usual stuff - so not exactly typical of the tenants who've lived here for most of the last 40 years, and not living in the sort of place they might themselves aspire to in 20 years' time. On the other hand, with each of them occupying a large 2-bedroom flat, with not that much stuff, and enough resource to afford to heat the place - and also the nouse not to make life horrible for their neighbours - they said it's a great place to live. Far better, indeed, than anything else they could afford in London - even though they were a good way from the nearest Tesco or an ATM, and a hundred miles away from a Tube station or anything cultural. But then, a lot of London is like that for a lot of people: the amazing thing round here is that we manage to house any working-class people in relatively decent conditions at all. Which, after all, was exactly the problem the 1960s folks were grappling with.

The first photo here is of one of the communal walkways as it crosses along the side of the main tower (i.e. not while it's hanging in thin air between the two towers). It looks OK, really, though it has a very 1960s meanness to it - nothing's wasted here by way of extra inches, and all the materials are those basic doors, tiles and glass which are "functional" but not much else. You certainly couldn't call this minimalism, since anyone with any sense knows that proper minimalism is usually quite generous in space and materials, and is so expensive it's way beyond the working classes. And our structural engineer's response was curious - he recognised the brown tiles on the floor (which it has to be said are holding up very well) but he maintained the blue tiles were a later addition, and the white ceiling boards were definitely an attempt to cover over something bad. Personally I can't imagine the blue tiles are anything but original - they're so "1960s council"; and so was the general atmosphere - not exactly smelly, but just on the way to that "communal living" smell you get in these places.

Once inside the flat we go downstairs again to its main level. The red colour here is cheerful but does little to hide that continual feeling of meanness: the stairs are narrow, the ceiling is low, and there's a rather wobbly 1960s balustrade at the bottom. You certainly couldn't make a grand entrance here, though if you were to be ruthlessly minimal about your life you could make it work. And actually it's much the same as you get in Goldfinger's own home at 2 Willow Road: there's that same pokeyness about the space.
The patterning on the wall of the stairs is curious. It's actually anaglypta wallpaper, the sort of embossed stuff you put on a flattish wall surface to cover up blemishes and give it some character - and then you paint it. The walls here are indeed flat - in fact they're plain unplastered concrete - but the effect of this wallpaper is to give it a pattern often produced by shuttered concrete. So it an attempt to deal with the ugliness of concrete we seem to have come round full circle!

Personally I hate unplastered concrete walls. Not only are they anathema to heat and insulation, they usually look far less flat than I like and they're murder if you want to put up shelves or knock any nails in. But then I've grown up with plasterboard, which although it's basically a false covering generally looks fairly good and collaborates in keeping the place warm and dry. Plasterboard is another luxury that wasn't available in the 1960s, and you can well imagine those guys thinking it would just be madness to wet-plaster everything. And again, concrete walls are exactly what Goldfinger had in his own home - though I dare say he also had the money and the nouse to live with them properly.
On the main floor of the flat, we find a surprisingly pleasant place. A large kitchen, a very pleasant living-room, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a separate toilet - and even a concrete planter on every balcony. And it's all very clean and white...almost as if it's been tidied up in honour of us coming.

Certainly there are some less-than-wonderful touches, like the funny little light switches set into the door frames (the frames themselves are metal, and hollow, and therefore useful as conduits for wires - another way of saving money.) And the scaffolding outside is not encouraging, though actually it's to do with renewing the electricity supply and is no reflection at all on the state of the building. The floors, too, have suffered a bit, though most of the thermoplastic tiles are still intact. And close up those big white panels on the window walls in the bedrooms look a bad idea. I also wonder about less tangible things, like noise insulation and the practicalities of dealing with waste. But hey...maybe it's not so bad.

Our last photo inside the flat is a curious little view - it's the fire escape! In today's blocks of flats we don't seem to have fire escapes at all - presumably because we trust our electronic fire and door systems to guard us - but in Goldfinger's day there weren't any such systems. He had to design in a physical fire escape, so here it is - a precarious steep little ladder which leads out of one of the bedrooms back up to the front-door walkway level. Even more curious, these fire escapes are shared by two flats, with the only protection from your neighbours being a bolt on your door. Clearly it demands that you be fairly able-bodied!

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?

Even looking locally, the view is astonishing. Here's a close up of Glenkerry House, the slightly later block also built by Goldfinger's practice, which bears many of his hallmarks; and a longer shot showing the tidy layout of the neighbouring square. It's funny how what feels a grotty area down at street level can look really pleasant when you're 21 floors up!

At the end of it all, I'm left with two questions: What would did it really take to live successfully and comfortably in a Goldfinger flat? And would I actually want to do so?

The answer to the first is really that it would take much the same as anywhere else, of course. For me, this means a list of things which probably weren't available to many of the working-class, poor, immigrant, destitute or other socially-failing people who've been billetted here over the years; but here, for the record, is my assessment:

• Tidyness, order and quietness - and an attitude to constantly strive for them. You'd go mad if you were messy in these flats, or if the environment around was messy.
• Constant attention to ventilation and warmth, and a readiness to sacrifice convenience and cost to achieve ventilation above all else.
• Under-occupancy - meaning I reckon one of these two-bedroom flats would just about suit me. Living with a partner might just about be OK, but certainly not a family!
• Not owning your own car. You might find parking, but you'd be constantly worried about it.
• Being generally able-bodied. You really do need to be able to walk long distances, climb up and down lots of steps, and be able to navigate comfortably through narrow spaces.
• Prepared to put up with poor public services. There are a couple of small stores, but you're some way from a decent Tesco or places like banks.
• Having sufficient income. I really wouldn't want to be out of work, or poor, here.
• No oil crisis. Well, that's history. I wouldn't wish high prices on ordinary tenants, but perhaps if I've got (7) then I could live with today's energy prices. And I do after all like to live cool.
• A landlord who looks after the communal aspects - by which I mean not only the insides of the building but also all the surrounding estate
• All your neighbours doing the same.

As for "would I want to live there?" If I could meet all these conditions, and if I had a flat high up with a good view... I just might. After all, wouldn't we all like to live in an architectural classic?!!