p.2 Towering ambitions: Balfron Tower and the National Trust 
For the National Trust to open a flat in a Brutalist, high-rise tower in East London is some departure from our usual stock in trade. A delicate country house or quaint tea room this is not. 

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. 

There are other reasons too. Balfron Tower would always be a logical first foray into Brutalism for the National Trust because we already care for the Goldfingers’ family home, 2 Willow Road. Moreover, in a recent BBC4 documentary, critic Jonathan Meades even went as far as to trace the lineage of 1960s Brutalism back to a National Trust property of 1728, John Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval Hall, describing it as “extremely butch, aggressive, sullen. Think Oliver Reed after about eight bottles of whisky.” 

On a more sober note, Goldfinger finds a surprising ally in the National Trust’s founder Octavia Hill, with their shared concern for communal green space. Hill, whose life was dedicated to providing better standards of housing, argued in 1888 that “tenants and all urban workers should have access to open spaces ... places to sit in, places to play in, places to stroll in, and places to spend the day in”. A sentiment echoed by Goldfinger in a letter to the Guardian eighty years later: “the whole object of building high is to free the ground for children and grown- ups to enjoy Mother Earth and not to cover every inch with bricks and mortar.” 

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. 

Welcome to Balfron. 

p.18 Balfron now 
“In a hundred years no one will know whether I was a good architect or not because all my buildings will have been destroyed.” 

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. 

Twenty-first century Balfron has seen its management pass to local housing association Poplar HARCA, who began a dynamic partnership with the Bow Arts Trust in 2008. 

A growing number of live-work artists’ studios have been established on site, harnessing local creativity into artistic interventions, many of which culminate in the current Balfron Season of events. 

Much like its past, its present is no stranger to controversy. Refurbishment now planned for the building, though vital to safeguard its future, comes with inevitable emotional upheaval for the residents who had made this place their home. 

It’s hard to imagine a time again when circumstances will be fertile for such dramatic social housing projects as Balfron and its contemporaries. 

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.