The Looming Presence of Trellick Tower.

The Brutalist concrete Trellick Tower in North Kensington seems to have received a cult status over the years and has certainly received , absurdly, a Grade II listing though it remains, in a peculiar sense fascinating in its faded and decayed futuristic way.

Built near Westway and finished by the early 70s it draws a person to it in the sense of dread best described by Soren Kierkegaard as the desire for what one dreads, that breeds anxiety as it looms sinisterly over the entire area of this part of north London,

"Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet one cannot tear himself free from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires".

Today on an urban walk towards Maida Hill down from Queens Park it drew me ever closer to it all the time almost against my will from Bravington Road down to the main Harrow Road where it was east to cross a small footbridge over the Grand Union Canal.

Clearly, the tenants do not care much for the council's regulations, as the rubbish bins where overflowing but across from Trellick stands one forlorn public house as a reminder this was one a densely built working class area of terraced housing before being smashed in the 60s.

This area is really the tail end of Notting Hill, though it is classified as North Kensington, but it stands in its own way from Kensal Way as arbitrarily positioned between the canal and the railway line close to the Westway which crunches its way towards Paddington.

Perhaps this is why it is said Ballard wrote a novel based on brutalist architecture like iit with its ability to brutalise the residents by sticking them high up in a nowhere land perched above the area. Unlike other tower blocks along towards Westbourne Grove it was a one off edifice.

As one commentator suggests,

The Trellick Tower is the largest and latest of these projects, a 31-story apartment slab, part of a complex of several buildings in North Kensington called Cheltenham Estate, built for the Greater London Council.

When it was built, Trellick was one of the tallest buildings in Europe and it came to epitomize all that was thought to be wrong with modern housing and urbanism following the wave of negative public sentiment about this kind of high-rise apartments that swept many countries in the 1970’s.

Trellick may have been the inspiration for the novel, High-Rise, written in 1975 by the English science fiction writer J.G. Ballard.

The last of a trilogy of books (Crash, 1973, Concrete Island, 1974) exploring common dystopian themes about the impact of modern technology on the human physic, High-Rise is a bleak apocalyptic tale about the social and physical disintegration of a community of 2000 people living in a 40-story apartment tower in London.

Much of the description of the tower in Ballard’s novel seem to have been derived directly from Trellick, the extended height, the facades and balconies, the articulated stairs and elevators, and the general Brutalist quality of the” concrete landscape”.

Ballard’s description of the tower as “an architecture built for war” certainly seems apropos vis-à-vis the Brutalist quality of the complex.

By the time High-Rise was published, there was already heightened public antagonism towards the typical modernist social housing development of the 1960’s and an accompanying fear of high rise buildings in general.

The questions is should the Trellick Tower have been listed. I do not think so. Rather as with large cooling towers I feel weirdly drawn to them but relieved when they get the necessary levels of TNT that level them down to the ground again.

( My own photos & more commentary tomorrow....)