The Mighty Balfron
a blog post about a blog post, a history within a history, 'all politics is personal', etc
Getting away from the ubiquitous Only Subject for a moment, a friend on Facebook posted earlier yesterday about going to visit the wonderful Brunswick Centre in Russell Square, and his thread sparked off the usual mild controversy that arises whenever someone says they like any Brutalist structure. So naturallythe usual little sub-chat developed about Balfron & Trellick Towers, Ernő Goldfinger’s famous Brutalist sisters of East and West London. As it happens, I have a little history with Balfron — a much littler history than I'd like to have, because I love the place.
<Cue picture going wibbly like being underwater; the protagonist is in a reverie…>
Once upon a time, after my marriage broke up, just before the Millennium (after nine years of pushing a succession of increasingly broken, child-laden buggies), my first proper foray back into paid work was as a publicity officer for Tower Hamlets Council’s then Housing Directorate. You can tell it was a different time, because I was able to sort of just fall into this job, almost by accident; it was all ad hoc in a way nothing seems to be any more.
It was based in a strange, rickety two-storey office block with sick building syndrome on the Isle of Dogs, and my chief responsibility was to produce and write a Housing Page in the council’s award-winning (and now defunct) weekly free newspaper, East End Life. This was a new workstream, negotiated on the basis that Housing, the largest directorate, paid more money to the newspaper than any other, and wanted to be able to promulgate its policies, programmes, etc.
As I say, I hadn’t worked in an actual job for nine years, and that had been in a bookshop. I’d never worked in housing, I’d never worked in a local authority, and I’d never worked on a newspaper. And there was nobody there who understood how this stuff worked, so I had to work it out on my own and just come up with the goods. I was in the so-called Quality Team, which everyone else hated because of the name; they thought the Quality Team thought it was better than everybody else. That’s another long story, and quite a funny one, in an unfunny way. But because of my role I did have links to the the central press office, the photographers, and East End Life itself (though they disliked me because I had been foisted on them), who were all situated in Town Hall — then a big new-build monstrosity with the quixotic name of Mulberry Place — a monolithic sort of fortress-like lump. (The new LBTH town hall is in a much more suitable and beautiful old building in Whitechapel Road, and is actually owned by the council, which is a good start, isn’t it?)
All these teams were quite high up in the building. And from where the photographers sat, the huge windows faced directly over Balfron Tower. Staring right in its lovely face. At certain times in the afternoon, at certain times of year, you’d look out the window and the sun would have reached some exact point where it shone somehow both on and through the building — where it lit the windows and even seemed to light the concrete, drawing out some latent warmth in its colour which only shows at those times — and the whole structure would turn to magic, music, poetry.
I could write a book about that job, and my next one as communications manager on the Ocean (Estate, Stepney) New Deal for Communities. So stressful, so exhausting, so endlessly educational. Seven years of dirty coalface politics: office, local, and even national, once George Galloway got involved as MP. My time there seemed to cast a light, or a shadow, on almost every crisis Britain was then, or is now, facing. It nearly gave me several nervous breakdowns and I’m more grateful than I can express for it. I knew I was never going to have anything like it again. Much of Tower Hamlets now is unrecognisable from then, too, as the big money’s moved in…
Back then I was living in Hackney Central, in a one-bedroom flat luckily rented from friends, with my three kids (who also spent roughly half their time with their dad in Stoke Newington, where they also still went to school). The job only worked at all because I had flexi-time. When they were at their dad’s I worked about 8.30-6.30, and when they were with me I would take them on the bus to school for 9am (half an hour), then grab a coffee at the little cafe next door and get the bus back down to Hackney Central, and then a 277 to Canary Wharf, where I’d get the DLR for the last bit. I’d arrive at the office at 10am, starving and winded — two hours door-to-door on a good day — and at 4pm I’d begin the reverse journey, which would take longer because I had to pick them all up from whoever’s houses they were playing at — and then get them home, make dinner, do the laundry, and get everyone sorted and into bed.
At the weekend I’d I’d go to bed when they did at 9 o’clock and wake up around twelve hours later to the sound of CBBC. I did this for years. When they were at their dad’s place I would be out as much as possible, because to be honest it just freaked me the fuck out having them not be there. So I did a lot of drinking with colleagues after work in the pub, which was also an education, after nine years cleaning the kitchen and reading bedtime stories with just the one o’clock club for a social life. My job involved speaking to local residents, youth clubs, care facilities, homeless projects, housing officers, all over the borough — I knew it was access I’d never have again. It was East End Immersion. According to the guy who sold the advertising, my page was the most-read page in East End Life.
Back to the building, a background note. Balfron Tower was built, and its grounds meticulously landscaped, in the mid-1960s as part of a modern and beautiful council housing estate, also including Goldfinger’s low-rise block, Carradale House. It enacted a generous and utopian view of what council housing could and should be. The flats inside were designed for livability and for an actual quality of life. The balconies have built-in spaces for planting flowers. The windows are big. The rooms aren’t huge but they are nice, cosy, and lead off each other in interesting ways, up or down a step, not just adjacent boxes. It feels solid. Even the original light switches were beautiful.
At the time I was working there it was mostly still occupied by council tenants. Poplar was a depressed area and hard to get to, and Balfron Tower was sandwiched in between Chrisp Street Market (then pretty down-at-heel) and the A12 approach to the never-pictureque Blackwall Tunnel; it seemed like it would always be the same. No one would want to live next to that motorway, and the area was so poor it was literally impossible to imagine it any other way. Just up the road there were Bengali families living in temporary housing inside the old fire station.
A year or so after I joined the council, a rare right-to-buy flat in Balfron Tower came up for sale, listed at £37,900. Oh my God. I thought about it — I thought about it so hard — I tried to imagine getting the kids up to school, then back for work, how could I manipulate my hours — £38,000 was only about twice my salary even then! I mean, it would need work. I obsessed over it for weeks, talked to friends, could it work. Could it? But.
But.
But one: I had no money for any sort of deposit at all. I had left my husband with £10 in my pocket and by that measure I was doing very well indeed, but it was abolutely payday to payday.
But two: at that time, no bank would have wanted to give you a mortgage on that property. Especially without the deposit. And I was on a six-month contract that just kept getting renewed — for borrowing purposes that was tantamount to having no job at all. This was one of the catalysts to me pushing the management with all my might and main, to get made permanent. Which worked, but that’s another story.
But three: I was in the middle of a custody drama, and living on the edge of civilisation next to a motorway by the Blackwall Tunnel would probably lose me the kids altogether.
But finally: actually, even in a best-case scenario, no way could I get them from Poplar up to Stoke Newington on puboic transport and me back to the Isle of Dogs in time for work, and then do it again in the evening. Even if I could, that would be really unfair on them, and the whole point of my life back then was to achieve maximum stability. Stability, calm, routine. If just for the kids.
But I still think about that flat. It lives somewhere within me.
Cut to about 2014: I no longer work in Tower Hamlets; in fact, I no longer have a job at all because my 12-year restarted career in the not-for-profits has ended with the Tory cuts in 2011: the so-called Bonfire of the Quangos. The kids are bigger, I have a lot more free time, and I’m in a relationship. The guy I’m in a relationship with, David, is a photographer with a big interest in London’s history and its fabric — and that fabric is changing, rapidly, so there’s a lot to photograph. He starts a beautiful blog called The London Column, to reflect on this and also the various histories that formed the contemporary city.
in 2013-4 Balfron Tower was emptied of its residents in preparation for a major refurbishment. By the way, when council tenants or leaseholders are moved out of their homes, in the jargon it’s called 'being decanted’. So the residents, some of whom may even have been there since it was built, were decanted from their homes. Like being water, just tipped out.
Pretty Carradale House had already been done, and when David said he wanted to go have a look around, I was all for it. The day we went was really perfect, a gorgeous sunny day, and Balfron looked more beautiful than ever. Its lettering, its landscaped gardens, even frankly its half-century-old slight dowdiness. Poplar had popped; there was trendy street art everywhere, Nathan Barley hipsters roamed around, and you just knew that despite mendacious promises to the contrary those council residents were never going to see the inside of that building again. Even I, who never got to live there, felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.
David wrote it up in this post in The London Column, where you can also see his photographs.
There’s more, too. The real crux of this post is a story from my Tower Hamlets days that expands on the connection of Balfron in the East with her sister Trellick in the West — these two slightly bohemian grand dames who’ve outlived their more optimistic time — and Balfron’s caretaker, Jock, a man whose story also encapsulates the social changes we’ve been living through — at that time, the only caretaker the building had ever had in all those years. I loved him, too. I wrote it all up for The London Column. Click on the image if you prefer, to be taken there.
(I’d love to be able to show you a photograph of Jock, by the way, and I’m sure there was one with the interview I did with him for East End Life, but unfortunately that’s in a storage unit; the lever arch file my East End Life articles are in is practically bigger than my desk, in this little flat!)
N.B., neither this account nor the one I wrote 11 years ago mentions the inauthentic new windows the developers put in, or the fact that they changed floor layouts in the flats, thus destroying the building’s integrity. Nobody knew in 2014 that they were going to do that. But here’s the piece from the C20 Society deriding the decisions. So really in that way, it was a goodbye.
Next post will be about current enormities.
