The east London brutalist landmark Balfron Tower was conceived as the perfect neighbourhood in the sky by its Marxist architect
It sounds like the kind of lively, communal vision for high-rise living that Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger imagined when he first designed the building in 1963, as part of the wider Brownfield estate of council homes on this slum clearance site. “The success of any scheme depends on the human factor,” he said, “the relationship of people to each other and the frame of their daily life which the building provides.”1
Almost 60 years later, Balfron’s streets have been scrubbed up and the residents’ facilities turbo-charged, but the kind of community that Goldfinger imagined has long since been evicted. In one of the most high-profile examples of a cash-strapped housing association flogging off a desirable tower block to pay for new homes nearby – and using resident artists to raise the property values in the process – the 146 flats have been gutted and gussied up to be sold to wealthy buyers. Where once Balfron looked out over declining docks, it now winks across the Thames at the towers of Canary Wharf, whose bankers are a target audience for the new flats, which went on sale this weekend.
- 1. As a committed Marxist, he intended his great concrete castle to provide exactly that kind of social frame for everyone, from all walks of life. He included rooms for table tennis and billiards, a “jazz/pop room” as well as a hobby room designed with older residents in mind. As far as possible, families were rehoused in the tower street by street, in an attempt to retain the neighbourly bonds along the new “streets in the sky”, designed like “East End pavements,” Goldfinger said, “on which the normal life of the neighbourhood continues”.
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As part of the refurbishment, flat 130 has been designated as one of six “heritage” apartments, preserving the original layout and colour scheme, with some period fixtures added to match the originals. A high-cistern pull-chain toilet stands next door to an enamel steel bath (in separate rooms, as they were), while the kitchen features stainless steel worktops and vintage taps sourced from eBay, so brutalism fans can cosplay at being the Goldfingers. Tucker says the flat in question is being held back for now, and will probably be sold to the highest offer through sealed bids – an ironic fate for the champagne socialists’ penthouse.
More than 1,200 interested buyers have already signed up, but Balfron hasn’t always been so desirable.1
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- 1. When it opened in 1968, commissioned by the London County Council as one of the tallest towers in Europe, there was an immediate vocal backlash. “Although perversely beautiful,” wrote Terence Bendixson in the Guardian in 1969, the tower “conjures up thoughts of prisons and pillboxes. Here, too, vandalism is setting in.” Goldfinger was typecast as a megalomaniac, imposing dangerously foreign ideas on Britain – a reputation that was amplified by the James Bond author Ian Fleming naming his monstrous Soviet villain after him . It didn’t much help that even the building’s fans hailed its aggressive, alienating form. “It is as though Goldfinger, from among the Functionalist totems, had chosen as a source of inspiration the artefacts of war,” wrote his former colleague James Dunnett in 1983. “The sheer concrete walls of the circulation tower are pierced only by slits; cascading down the facade like rain, they impart a delicate sense of terror.”
