Chapter Eight ‘We Felt Magnificent Being up There’ – Ernő Goldfinger's Balfron Tower and the Campaign to Keep It Public
DAVID ROBERTS
In December 2015, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets approved plans to refurbish and privatise Balfron Tower, a high-rise of 146 flats and maisonettes arranged on 26 storeys built in 1965–7, the first phase of émigré architect Ernő Goldfinger’s work on the Greater London Council’s (GLC) Brownfield Estate in Poplar, east London (Figure 8.1).
In this chapter, I describe my collaborative work with the tower’s current and former residents in the preceding three years, during which we campaigned for Balfron to remain a beacon for social housing. I structure the chapter on the three phases this work followed: an
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