The borough likes to make the most of these displays.
When Farnell Point on Hackney Downs was set for demolition last year the public were invited to a free fun day to "say farewell to Farnell point".
Like the public execution of hated local villains in olden times, such events attract crowds of thousands. But could the guilty verdict on tower blocks be the result of rough justice?
Last week an exhibition Tower Blocks: love them or loathe them, was launched at the Museum of London with a debate on the subject. High rise came out on top.
The cause of tower blocks has been taken up by a growing group of mostly childless people with a soft spot for modernist architecture, and a nostalgia for utopian planning.
According to the exhibition, high rise is now chic. Articles about the delights of living on the 20th floor have appeared in glossy lifestyle magazines.
University College London architectural historian Iain Borden reckons that people who like tower blocks, "like the dynamism of urban life and the challenges that go with living in the city."
Borden's views are backed by Lee Boland, chair of the residents association at Trellick Tower, west London. She admits that "tower block living is not for everyone," but claims that "it works when you get people who want to live there."
Boland thinks that a lot of resentment about high rise has arisen because people were allocated to live in places like Trellick Tower on a no-choice basis. She claims that the Right to Buy helped change the perception of the Trellick Tower.
But according to local estate agents it is only in the last two or three years that tower blocks have become popular. Rob Atkins, department manager at Notting Hill Gate office of the estates agency Foxtons, says that two years ago homes in Trellick Tower would fetch £80,000.
He says: "The only people interested were artistic types who didn't care about the culture of the building" (estate agent speak for council tenants). Now he claims that ex-Right to Buy flats in the tower can reach up to £175,000.
The selling points for Atkins are the location, the views, and the space standards - "space for money is very good".
The added attraction of tower blocks is that many were built by so-called "signature architects" - Berthold Lubetkin, Powell and Moya, Denys Lasdun or in the case of Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger. Homes designed by council in-house teams are not quite as sought after, but can still go for more £100,000 according to Atkins.
Does this new fashion improve the prospect of these estates?
Amongst the gloomy warnings in Anne Power's report on city abandonment, The Slow Death of Great Cities, there were some "hopeful signs of recovery" (Housing Today, issue 132). It points to the sale of "new-style city flats" to young working households as creating a helpful knock-on effect on the image of city housing.
"What was formerly rejected as a hated industrial relic is being 'gentrified'," it says. Could tower blocks, the hated relic of another era, soon enjoy the same change in fortune that warehouses had in the 1980s?
Stephen Green, a sales negotiator with M&M property links, which specialises in selling ex-council housing, claims that he could sell tower blocks flat for a lot more if only the communal areas were better maintained.
He says: "People don't want to buy a place if the hallways are covered in graffiti and smell of urine."
Demand for flats in Trellick Tower soared only after the Kensington and Chelsea tenant management organisation installed entry phones and a concierge on the block.
TMO chief executive Martin Kingsford has spent most of his working life dealing with Trellick Tower. "In the early days we had nightmarish management problems. I make no secret of that."
In the 1980s the tower was voted one of three worst buildings in London.
Kingsford insists that the fortune of the block has been turned round by "good, old-fashioned, housing management - high security matched by a proactive resident's association."
The demand from young professionals for flats in the block is the by-product of that success, not a cause of it, he says.
He claims he knew nothing about the new fashion for tower blocks generally, and Trellick in particular, until he read about it in the Guardian.
Before this magazine gets as carried away as some of the others, it should be noted that outside central London, tower blocks are still more loathed than loved.
Leeds head of housing management services Des Morris is in charge of a marketing campaign for the city's housing stock. He says the campaign has helped Leeds "hold its own" in the face of falling demand, but points out that flats in tower blocks present the toughest challenge to let.
He says he would "love it" if tower blocks became trendy in Leeds, but seems to doubt that it will ever happen: "Even in the most buoyant demand areas, we have not experienced many sales on tower block properties in Leeds."
One of the reasons that tower blocks are still generally loathed is not only the way they look, but the shoddy way they were built. The reputation of high rise has never really recovered from the collapse of part of Ronan Point in 1968, which left five people dead.
Many tower blocks were the result of a desire to build quickly and cheaply - corners were cut to save money, a lot of the materials were unsafe and the attention to detail was sloppy. Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers, a new novel about the rise and fall of tower blocks in Glasgow, poignantly notes that "you can't get coffins into the lifts".
Tower blocks are also more expensive to refurbish than conventional homes. Tower Hamlets' Keeling House, designed by the signature architect Denys Lasdun, will cost £125,000 per flat to refurbish.
The response from the defenders of high rise is that the construction quality of the first tower blocks was the worst.
Like car designs, they say, the technology of high rise construction has radically improved in the last 30 years.
If more tower blocks were built well, like Trellick Tower, it would have been a different story, according to resident Lee Boland.
She says: "If tower blocks were a failed experiment, it's because they were badly designed, and badly built with profit in mind rather than people". She claims that they can still be a model for housing provision especially given the shortage of land.
Hackney council's director of estate management and development David Thompson has his doubts. The borough still plans to demolish six more tower blocks. (Two with explosives to add to the record).
But even Thompson sees that there can be merits in retaining some blocks. The borough spared one in Clapton for low-cost home ownership and the homes are selling well.
Thompson also revealed that the growing popularity of high rise could influence the fate of the borough's New Deal for Communities area in Stepney.
But he still sees demolition as the best way of creating a new mood in an area as well as providing the homes with gardens that most families want.
"The statement of change by actually demolishing is profound. Where a tower block remains, it's a symbol of all the problems of the past - of council's inability to manage that kind of housing and the anti-social behaviour that went on, that's very important."
These are sentiments that all but those with the most perverse architectural tastes would support. The only lingering doubt is that tastes change. The great slum clearance programmes of terraced housing were also supposed to provide a break with the past. There is no accounting for taste.
Source
Housing Today
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