Balfron Tower, Tower Hamlets, London

Ernö Goldfinger was a member of an important group of European émigré architects that arrived in London in the late 1930’s.

Balfron Tower - a 28 storey tower block on the Brownfield Estate in Poplar, East London.
It was approved in 1965 and completed in 1971, containing 146 flats. It became a listed building in 1996, recognised for it’s daring brutalist design.

Like the other tower blocks on the Brownfield Area estate, it was designed by Erno Goldfinger and acted as an experiment for the Trellick Tower built 2 years later in north Kensington, North London. Trellick Tower took many design cues from Balfron Tower like the detached services tower and modernist design. Erno Goldfinger stayed for 2 months on
the 26th floor to show faith in his design and threw lavish parties for friends, family and residents.
It is 200metres from Poplar High Street.

It forms part of the Brownfield social housing estate close to the northern approaches to the Blackwall Tunnel under the river Thames. Since 1998 Balfron Tower has been a Grade II* listed building.
It is associated with the Brutalist style of 1960s architecture. Both Balfron and Trellick towers are often regarded as striking or ugly.
Goldfinger himself was pleased with the design and moved in to flat 130, on the 26th floor, for two months in 1968 to find out what the residents liked and disliked about his design. What he learnt was applied to the design of Trellick Tower. Goldfinger also designed Carradale House and Glenkerry
House, part of the same estate and complementing Balfron Tower in style.

These buildings are now all part of the Balfron Tower Conservation Area, designated in 1998.
He colour-coded each of Trellick Tower’s floors so that, when the lift doors opened, residents would know immediately if they were on the right level - a useful prop, he half joked, for anyone staggering home drunk.
In December 2007, following a ballot of residents in 2006, Tower Hamlets Council transferred its ownership of Balfron Tower and the surrounding Brownfield Estate to Poplar HARCA, a Registered Social Landlord.[1] The association is legally committed to carry out a full refurbishment of the
tower.

Balfron Tower is 84 metres high and contains 146 flats. Lifts serve all entry floors (that is every third floor); thus, to reach a flat on the 11th, 12th or 13th floors, residents or visitors would take a lift to the 12th. The lift shaft sits in a separate service tower, joined to the residential tower by the seven walkways.
Goldfinger died in 1987, and so did not live to see Trellick Tower fêted in the media as a newly fashionable dwelling for urban professionals.