Our history
Glenkerry House and the neighbouring Balfron Tower and Carradale House were designed by the Hungarian-born Brutalist architect Ernő Goldfinger. All have now been categorised as Grade II listed buildings, as have their immediate environs.
The building of Glenkerry House
Situated in Poplar in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, within the conservation area of the Brownfield Estate, Glenkerry forms part of a trio of towers, begun with the 27-storey Balfron Tower in the mid-1960s and followed by the adjacent 11-storey Carradale House. After a brief detour to build the celebrated Trellick Tower in North Kensington, Goldfinger’s studio returned to complete Glenkerry House in the late 1970s, but with the Greater London Council (GLC) having learned all the lessons of earlier high-rise building. The Brownfield Estate is recognised as a monument to Brutalist idealism, and is regularly visited by architecture students and enthusiasts.
The building of Glenkerry House was initially commissioned by the GLC, and construction was completed in 1977; Glenkerry was probably the last tower block to be built by the GLC (before its dissolution in 1986). Upon completion, the GLC handed it over to the Greater London Secondary Housing Association (GLSHA), a body set up to promote and service co-operative schemes around Greater London. GLSHA had set up six co-operative schemes of different kinds around London; they decided to establish Glenkerry House as a Community Leasehold Housing Co-operative in which the block would be managed, not by an external company, but by the residents themselves.
Glenkerry House remained empty for some 18 months before the first Co-operators moved into the block, in the spring of 1979. GLSHA managed the scheme until April 1980, when the elected Management Committee took over. Since that time, the block has been run by the Committee of Management, whose members are elected by the block’s leaseholders from among themselves.
Who was Ernő Goldfinger?
Goldfinger was, infamously, the inspiration for the name of a villain in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Yet, although the architect’s work was controversial and often derided, it satisfied a need for affordable social housing in London in the years following World War 2. A confirmed Marxist, Goldfinger expressed his utopian principles in his designs for high-rise social housing, typified in Balfron Tower; he and his wife lived in the tower for two months so they could learn from the residents what worked and what was less successful in the building.
Ernő Goldfinger and wife Ursula Blackwell, Balfron Tower.
In 2024, residents of Glenkerry House interviewed James Dunnett, who was a member of Goldfinger's studio at the time when Glenkerry House was designed and built. In this short interview, he explains his role as a junior member of the studio and his involvement with Glenkerry House, as well as outlining some of the principles of Brutalist architecture.