I got a text from an endlessly glamorous single friend recently, telling me she’d pulled someone with a flat in Trellick Tower, and how envious she knew I’d be of getting a gander inside. It instantly made me think about a blog post on ‘boys’ flats I have known’ – still in the pipeline. Of course I’d already been into Trellick, to interview someone about living in this incredible Brutalist London icon, and even without the benefit of an evening on the Tia Maria it looked wonderful. Views across west London and beyond, and an intelligent design of two linked floors which made the most of them. I have never, however, been inside Trellick’s sister building, the Balfron Tower. It shares the same distinctive style of a slim lift column connected to the main building by walkways, but unlike Trellick it sits in a very unfashionable part of town. Driving north through the Blackwall Tunnel it looms out of the warehouses of Poplar at you.

Image: Joe Roberts

The decision to ‘decant’ all the social tenants of the Balfron Tower, and a recent confirmation that they do not have the right to return, has brought this building back into the news. A couple of articles have told me plenty I didn’t know about the Tower. For example it was designed with all the bedrooms on the eastern side, to make the most of the morning sun, and all the balconies are on the west, the better to view the sunset over Stepney. Also, as is revealed in this excellent Guardian article, the architect Erno Goldfinger and his wife Ursula lived in one of the apartments when it was first built to test for teething problems. They held drinks receptions for the tenants and Ursula recorded in her diary that “Those I have been into are beautifully kept, [but] people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments.” Take that, social tenants and your terrible taste!

Image: Flat 130 recreated by Wayne & Tilly Hemingway for the National Trust

The other thing revealed by the Guardian piece is the – surprising to me at least – fact that while Kensington Borough’s Trellick remains mainly social housing for rent (181 out of 217 flats), Balfron will be reopening with no social housing within it at all. And no matter how free the newly refurbished flats turn out to be of terrible furniture and carpets, this is surely a sad result for both the decanted residents and this beacon of 1960s social housing.