Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower

The brutalist Brownfield Estate in Poplar, East London is home to Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower - one of my favourite buildings in London.

The 27-storey residential tower is the older, but smaller, sister to the famous (and much more gentrified) Trellick Tower in west London. 

It is part of the Brownfield Estate....a bruatlist architecture lover's dream....where all three buildings were designed by Goldfinger (the namesake of Ian Fleming's worst James Bond villain) for London County Council. 

The Balfron Tower and its neighbour Carradale House were commissioned and designed together in 1963 for the London County Council and completed in 1967 and 1970 respectively. 


Carradale House sits lower than the tower, with just 11 floors, housing 88 flats which have their windows on a north/south axis. 


Goldfinger's signature lift tower sits between two separate blocks here, giving a different silhouette. 

Both buildings have their foundations below ground level. So when you're approaching the estate it looks like these concrete giants have risen out of the ground with the A12 Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach and its constant stream of cars as a living backdrop.

Entry to the Balfron Tower is over a concrete bridge, which still leads to the original door.

Inside a big sign points you to which floor all the flats are on. This is definitely necessary here, as the generally accepted nomenclature of flats starting with 1 being on the first floor, 2 on the second, etc. is redundant here because of the odd design.

The walkways linking the service tower to the building actually sit on every third floor, so for example flats on floors 11, 12 and 13 are all accessible from the 12th floor, a peculiarity that's repeated at Carradale House and in the Trellick Tower.

The service tower also gives access to the drying rooms, which are now mostly redundant as people have washing machines and dryers in their own rooms. But it does still have a working rubbish chute!

The lifts take you to a small foyer room in the service tower, where you can peek out of the distinctive long rectangular windows at the view, with doors leading out to the main structure and corridor.

The top floor corridor, where this photo was taken, is home to flat 130 on the 25th floor where Goldfinger lived with his wife for two months in 1968. Here he famously threw a series of lavish parties to show just how splendid it was to live in this building, and he tried to engage with local residents to find out how they felt about his design.

Seeing as the Trellick Tower wasn't much changed to this building, it can be safe to say he was pretty pleased with it all.

The corridors have doubled glazed windows overlooking the A12, and out onto the A11 taking you on its wave-shaped asphalt away from London.

From the other side you can see out over East London's Ocean Estate, with the Gherkin and other City buildings in the distance.

And you can also see Goldfinger's third building on the estate, the 14-storey Glenkerry House.

Glenkerry House, like its neighbours also named after a Scottish city, was built later than the other two in  1979.

 

All three buildings are now Grade II listed - so no demolition here.

They really do sit far out in East London and though the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is working to spruce up this area, it really is bleak. There are DLR and some bus links, but that's about it except for Frederick Gibberd's nearby Chrisp Street Market, which was originally designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain but was looking pretty empty too on the day we visited.

That's it from the Brownfield Estate, but first I need to say a huge thank you to the lovely people at Open House , who added the Balfron Tower to their weekend for the first time. 

And finally in honour of my earlier post about Suede's Animal Nitrate video which featured the Lisson Green Estate, the Balfron Tower gets the prize for being the second best use of a council estate in a video, this time for the opening sequence of Oasis' (What's the story) Morning Glory - where the east London gem often gets mistaken for its west London rival.

But the eagle eyed will see Canary Wharf in the distance....

Bright lights of Heygate continue to shine

Southwark Council has come under criticism for paying £22,000 a year to keep streetlights shining at the doomed Heygate Estate.

Only a handful of people - 40 at the last count - remain in the sprawling estate, which is now home to 1,200 empty flats.

The Evening Standard said: "The cost includes bulbs that remain lit on dozens of walkways and stairwells where no one can go because they have been completely sealed off with steel doors to thwart squatters. Workmen failed to disconnect the lights first and the council says it is now cheaper to leave them on rather than unseal each landing."

But I agree with councillor Ian Wingfield, who said the lights are there for resident's safety - and surely for anyone else who might find themselves there.

Can you imagine if the council turned off all the lights and it became a haven for youths/prostiutes/general undesirables? A mugging or even a murder in a derelict estate that the council NEGLECTED TO KEEP SAFE?

Europe's largest estate - the notorious Aylesbury

The Aylesbury in south London is infamous and famous in equal measure.

Designed by architect Derek Winch, construction on the 28.5 hectare housing estate started in 1963 and was intended to house some of London's poorest families in a mixture of high- and low-rise apartment towers connected by walkways. Building the Aylesbury took more than a decade, and the final block wasn't finished until 1977.

In typical 1960s style it shows little in the way of socially friendly design.

Since then the Aylesbury has become so symbolic of urban England that Tony Blair chose to make his first speech as prime minister outside parliament. It was here he outlined his vision for regenerating inner cities and ridding Britain of 'no hope areas' - a brave move, some might say, in hindsight.

Named after the town of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, its various sections are named after other local towns from the shire - Chiltern, Winslow, Wendover, Taplow, Ravenstone, Latimer, Padbury and Missenden.

As well as more than 2,700 homes the estate has a medical centre, nursery and health centre.

More recently the estate has been in the news after a gang of young men terrorised residents of the Aylesbury in 2009, three of whom were tried at the Old Bailey in August 2010.

Led by Deniz Ozdil and Callum Hall,  the case showed echoes of the film Harry Brown - filmed at the nearby Heygate, where Michael Caine plays a pensioner turned vigilante that takes on a group of youths wreaking havoc in a council estate where he lives.

At the hearing the court heard how Hall and Anthony Babalola, accompanied by two other young men, broke into a flat, threatening a young woman and her two children with a gun, demanding to know the whereabouts of her brother.

In another incident the gang approached a teenager on the estate and threatened him with a gun and hunting knife, demanding money.

The gang leaders were eventually arrested in late 2009 and are currently awaiting sentencing after their trail.

Meanwhile, the London Borough of Southwark continues to fight hard to regenerate its sink estates, namely the Heygate and Aylesbury.

The Aylesbury Regeneration website  says that phase 1a, in the south-west corner of the estate, will be available later this year - providing new homes for some residents (administered by the London and Quadrant Housing Trust).

The ultimate goal is to remodel the estate over 15 years, replacing the existing dwellings with 4,200 new homes, with 1,700 properties to be demolished in the first ten years (including five of the high rise blocks).

This means these blocks will soon become shadows of themselves, before they too are destroyed forever.