T O THEIR FIRST residents, the tower blocks British councils built in the 1950s and 1960s were symbols of post-war aspiration, homes that seemed to offer in all senses the chance to go up in the world. But by the 1980s they were so stigmatised that the Trotter family, of the television comedy “Only Fools and Horses”, dreamed of moving from their high-rise flat in Nelson Mandela House to a proper home with a garden. “What chance do we stand?” asked Del Boy, a trader whose empire supposedly sprawled from New York to Paris via Peckham. “You need to have nine kids and speak with a foreign accent.”

Residents are finally moving out of Nelson Mandela House—or rather Harlech Tower, the 13-storey block in Acton, west London, where the series was partly shot. It is one of seven towers in the borough of Ealing that are earmarked for demolition. Yet even as the wrecking ball nears, cranes are at work across the road. London has only 360 buildings of 20 storeys or more. But another 540 or so are in the pipeline, with a spike in completions due this year (see chart). And whereas Britain’s first generation of towers became synonymous with poverty, many of the new ones are totems of wealth.

Cathedral spires and town halls dominated British skylines until the 1950s. In many cities they still do. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), an industry association, Britain has 20 skyscrapers taller than 150m, only five more than North Korea (and 761 fewer than America). But between the 1950s and the early 1970s, councils threw up a few thousand shorter tower blocks, encouraged by government subsidies. They were proud of their modernist creations: Acton council issued tickets for the opening of its first tower. Those moving from slums were thrilled by relatively spacious rooms and indoor bathrooms. “We thought we was moving into Buckingham Palace,” one early resident later told the Evening Standard.

Back down to earth

Problems soon cropped up. Architects’ grandiose vision of “streets in the sky” became dark passages prone to crime and anti-social behaviour. As in America, “problem” estates became known for “concentrating poverty rather than alleviating it”, says Daniel Safarik of the CTBUH . Councils that could not foot the bill to maintain blocks in good condition left residents with broken lifts or vandalised communal spaces. By 2002, when a pollster asked Britons to pick out an image of their favourite home, none chose a tower.

At Harlech Tower, paint peels off the walls in a chilly stairwell, adorned in places with mould. The lift doors have developed a habit of reopening as soon as they close. “They’ve been like that a couple of days,” explains Abdullah Ali, a bus driver who lives on the fourth floor. “You just need to push the doors together.” The block is no good for children, he says. His four kids share a bedroom and he worries they might fall out of a window. Residents will be offered new social-housing lets by 2023, before the tower and its two neighbours are torn down. David Colley of Ealing council says the blocks were built “with a limited life”, as the council borrowed against predicted rental income for 60 years. “They are basically knackered. We are better off starting again,” he says. The first wave of demolitions in the 1980s was sometimes purely for aesthetic reasons, but councils now often claim the cost of refurbishing towers outweighs the initial outlay to build anew. In 2017 North Lanarkshire council announced plans to demolish all 48 of its blocks. About 80 estates in London face the bulldozer, at least in part. Yet Ealing is also in the vanguard of London’s high-rise renaissance. The borough has only two buildings higher than 20 storeys, but 24 more are in the works, the highest percentage rise in London. After a fire at Grenfell Tower in Kensington killed 71 residents in 2017, some pundits predicted the end of the high-rise. Yet building has since gathered pace. The capital’s population is projected to grow by 9% between 2016 and 2026, but the city is encircled by green-belt land, where development is prohibited. New towers could help to tackle the shortage of homes. Architecture buffs searching for brutalist chic are rehabilitating some older blocks. This time, though, most of the high-rises are being built by private developers for private buyers. The first of these new flats were “seen as a luxury item” for rich people, says Peter Murray of New London Architecture, which puts on pow-wows for planners and developers. But, he says, “that’s beginning to shift now”, with more affordable housing being included in towers, and more blocks being built by housing associations.

Architects are keen to avoid the mistakes of their forebears. Some think the answer is to build “vertical communities”, with flats nestled between restaurants and concert halls, to stop estates growing isolated. All agree maintenance is crucial. Wealthier tenants will stump up for concierges and engineers to fix the lifts. “The lights aren’t going to go out in the stairwell,” says Lynsey Hanley, author of “Estates: An Intimate History”. “The bin chutes aren’t going to catch fire.” They might even tempt Del Boy from Peckham.