The National Trust gets brutal
The desk area of the living room at Balfron Tower done by Hemingway Design. Photo courtesy Chloe Nelkin Consulting
It can be hard to like brutalist architecture. The minimalist, harsh concrete of many of these buildings, for their designers, heralded the hope and social practicality that would build a better future in the 1960s. Yet, the following decades saw them burdened with the reputation of failing social housing and the vision of a violent dystopian future. Against our modern pairing of heritage restored and shining sheets of glass, these buildings fall between two stools and seem ripe for demolition.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, it is the National Trust that is helping to make the argument for why this architecture deserves our attention and appreciation. One of brutalism's best-known proponents Erno Goldfinger (although he rejected the term for all the connotations it would later prove to attract) also designed and built his own house in London, marrying his minimalist concerns with the Georgian aesthetic of Hampstead. 2 Willow Road, filled with Goldfinger's sleek designs and the best work of his contemporary artists is already a jewel in the National Trust crown.
30 years later, Goldfinger was employed by the Central London Authority to design a succession of high-rise buildings in Poplar to replace terraces destroyed in the Blitz. The Goldfingers lived in one flat in the best-known block, Balfron Tower, for 2 months when it opened. The National Trust's exciting new 'NT London' initiative has taken the opportunity to open this flat to the public for 12 days, furnished by Hemingway Design as it might have been lived in by a family in1968. I was lucky enough to visit on a glorious sunny Sunday morning last week.
The flat is a triumph. Carefully filled with furniture and belongings as if the family have just stepped out for half an hour, you get a real sense for how it was lived in, and how Goldfinger had thought about the space. Each of the smaller bedrooms is imagined for the son or daughter of the family with period clothes and posters. The table is set with china and the kitchen filled with 1960s mod cons. As you enter the bright hall, a coat and bag are even hung on the pegs.
Flat 130 is on the top floor, and the views over London are spectacular. But they also give a clear sense of what a break from the past Balfron Tower represented, what a different perspective of how communities in London could live. The excellent, enthusiastic NT volunteer guides helped to put this in perspective, giving us an introduction to the housing estate and Goldfinger's ambitions. The new towers would, literally, elevate people from condemned slum housing, create communal green space and functional housing units, still grouped around the traditional sense of community.
These flats tell us something unique about how London space has been lived in and thought about in the past, how the 20th century changed the shape of urban living. They are as central to British architectural heritage, then, as a Hardwick Hall or Stowe. I can't wait to see what the National Trust will open up next.
