March 2010

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Nobody, it seems, was happier to record the universally hated monolith’s post-demolition fate — it now forms the layer of hardcore beneath the runways of Luton airport — than campaigning journalist, ex-council house dweller, author of this, at times, vituperative polemic, Lynsey Hanley, who uses her sharp pen to launch one of the most excoriating attacks I’ve read in six months of Sundays, not only on the fat, cost-cutting contractors of that particular debacle, but (somewhat nugatorily given her lack of architectural credentials) on the whole modernist (Mieso-Corbusian) manifesto itself and — for all the wrong reasons — the brutal concretisation of our green and pleasant land.

I cannot take seriously any commentator on our built environment who relies on the negative dilettantism of the Prince of Wales to prop up their arguments. As if the heir apparent’s now rather predictable comments on a public library in Birmingham — ‘a place for burning books rather than reading them’ — were not destructive enough in their own right, Hanley weighs in with her own wholly redundant descriptions of this much needed communal facility — ‘a big brown sandwich loaf of sand-blasted concrete’ — wagging her finger proselytisingly: ‘concrete used like this is an enemy of the people’s will.’ And so she turns her vitriol on arch villain (in her world) architect Erno Goldfinger, who is singled out for a dressing down because he had the temerity (along with his wife ‘the Cross and Blackwell heiress’, Hanley adds pointedly) to move into a flat in one of his own ‘monstrosities’, Balfron Tower. To demonstrate how happy he was ‘to live where he would have others live’, Goldfinger would condescendingly throw champagne parties for hoi polloi on the lower floors.

So far as Hanley is concerned, the social malaise we have come to associate with council estates is exclusively connected to high-rise towers and those who design them. But apartments in Goldfinger’s now privatised Trellick Tower are selling for up to £300,000 a unit. The upwardly mobile seem content to inhabit Hanley’s ‘slums in the sky’ for all their faults. Would this not suggest it’s the people not the buildings they’re housed in that are malfunctioning?