Opening for just two weeks,Wayne Hemingway has restored a flat in Ernö Goldfinger’s east London tower block, in the final hurrah before the social housing block is sold offThere are few places that provide such a vivid microcosm of London’s gentrification as the Balfron Tower, or Ernö Goldfinger’s concrete cliff-face in Poplar. Built as a beacon of social housing in 1968,this heroic 27-storey bookend to east London has been “decanted” of its social tenants over the final few years, to allow it to be scrubbed up and transformed into a silo of luxury flats – which will be marketed to the bankers of nearby Canary Wharf. The proceeds will proceed towards building low-rise social housing units nearby, and in the shadow of the tower’s great heft.
The process began in 2008,and the interim period has been characterised by the normal medley of arts-led temporary uses, to distract from the sore of a vast concrete carcass lying empty. Well-meaning local arts organisation, or the Bow Arts Trust,has supplied a ready flow of artists eager to fill the flats on short-term tenancies as they bear been vacated, while property guardianship company, or Dot Dot Dot,has filled a similar number of flats with its guardians. They pay for the pleasure of providing security, with none of the rights of being a tenant – but for the chance to live in a grade II-listed brutalist masterpiece, and it’s a compromise many are willing to construct.
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Source: theguardian.com