The 1975 novel High-Rise depicted an apocalyptic tower that drove its inhabitants insane. As a new film adaptation hits cinemas, we wonder what the author would have made of today’s rash of skyscrapers for the megarich

Dressed from head to toe in white, standing in his private garden on the roof of his latest tower block while his wife rides a white horse around its manicured lawn, Anthony Royal is the perfect symbol of the megalomaniac modernist architect. The villainous protagonist of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise presides like a puppet-master over his “crucible for change”, a brave experiment in vertical living that quickly unravels into a concrete dystopia, driving its residents to madness in the floors beneath his feet.

First published when the 40-storey concrete towers of the Barbican Centre were being erected on London’s skyline, High-Rise caught the popular imagination at a time when suspicion of top-down postwar city planning was growing. “A hideous warning,” was the quote taken from the Guardian review emblazoned on the book’s cover, suggesting that Ballard’s intention was a damning critique of the inhumane direction modern architecture had taken.

The writer seems to slot neatly into a narrative that begins with Jane Jacobs’s attack on the alienating effect of towers and defence of traditional neighbourhoods, and culminates with Alice Coleman’s 1985 report Utopia on Trial, which framed tower blocks as incubators of crime and antisocial behaviour.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tom Hiddleston stars as the antihero of High-Rise.

Forty years on, the book has finally been turned into a film starring Tom Hiddleston. Directed by Ben Wheatley, it is being released at a time when 436 new towers are planned for London and public hostility to tall buildings runs high. Protests have led to plans for a 72-storey skycraper by Shard architect Renzo Piano being withdrawn, while residents rallying beneath the banner of More Light More Power continue to battle towers on Bishopsgate which they claim will “blot out the sky”. Even New Yorkers have had enough, now campaigning against a rash of super-tall residential totem poles topped with $100m penthouses that symbolise the city’s increasing social divide.

It is this social inequality written in glass and steel that drives Ballard’s High-Rise. The story follows the trajectory of a tower block in a new middle-class estate on the edge of London, conceived as a “huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation”, with all daily functions from leisure facilities to a supermarket and school provided across its 40 floors.

The film design riffs on the brutalist Bangor Leisure Centre, Barbican and the ziggurat of the old Birmingham Library

The film’s production designer, Mark Tildesley, who also created the post-apocalyptic sets for 28 Days Later, has conjured a stirring structure that riffs on various notable buildings of the period, using a mixture of the interiors of the brutalist Bangor Leisure Centre in Northern Ireland and a lot of CGI. His tower sports the same curved-profile balconies as the Barbican, while the way it steps out at its upper levels like a teetering pile of books recalls the ziggurat of the old Birmingham Library . This precipitous overhang gives it an apt sense of instability, as if the dream might topple at any minute. Sure enough, in a later scene, one resident is seen freefalling to their doom past its beautifully sculpted cliff-face.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Brave new world’ … Erno Goldfinger, left, admires the view from Balfron Tower in Poplar, east London, with then Greater London Council leader Desmond Plummer, centre, and housing chairman Horace Cutler in 1968. Photograph: Jim Gray/Getty Images

There are strains too of the otherworldly, angular concrete forms of London’s Thamesmead estate (itself used as a set for A Clockwork Orange), with neighbouring towers under construction around a planned lake. Other shots recall the walkways of the Balfron Tower – whose architect, Erno Goldfinger, lived on the 24th floor of his masterpiece for a while, just like Royal, holding champagne soirees to which he invited the residents, floor-by-floor. It was in order, Goldfinger wrote, to “experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise from my designs so that I can correct them in the future”. The experiment lasted two months, before the architect and his wife retreated to their Hampstead nest on Willow Road.



Residing in this brave new world are a cross-section of society, socially stratified between the floors, from the “proletariat” of film-technicians and air hostesses Ballard describes as inhabiting the bottom floors, to the “oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs” at the upper levels. The majority of residents, occupying the middle levels, are described as “self-centred yet basically docile members of the professions,” with “all the cohesion of those eager to settle for second best”.

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The residents (who were perhaps modelled on the kind of people Ballard saw moving into the Barbican) turn out to be voluntary prisoners of an eventless world, which, as a result of their boredom, rapidly begins to spiral out of control. Stacked up in anonymous units, their suffocating sense of solitary confinement leads first to drug-fuelled orgies, then to class hostility and inter-floor competition, and finally to wholesale war, as bands of knife-wielding neighbours regress to feral savagery. The building, as Ballard puts it, was a “Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one opening inward”. As pathologist Dr Robert Laing, Hiddleston’s cool-headed antihero initially surfs the chaos with clinical detachment – like Ballard himself. “The ones who are the real danger are the self-contained types like you,” remarks Wilder, the murderous ringleader of the lower floors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The residents of Ballard’s novel turn out to be voluntary prisoners of an eventless world.

So far, so dystopian. Modernism, High-Rise seems to say, spawned an era of crazed architects, drunk on the power of their drawing boards, whose bold dreams were bound to end in social psychosis and apocalyptic scenes of dogs being barbecued over campfires of phone directories.

But it’s not quite so simple. Ballard’s books might read like straightforward attacks on modernity, but they are anything but. The Atrocity Exhibition, which established his literary reputation in 1969, used an aggressive backdrop of freeways, multi-storey carparks and concrete tower blocks for a dizzying collage of sexual violence and pop culture, themes that would be cranked up in his 1973 follow-up, Crash. Later novels Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes explored the dark impulses fostered by modern gated communities. It was these seemingly sterile non-places – the malls and freeways, airport terminals and windswept plazas – that Ballard found so compelling. Liberated from the baggage of history and expectation, these were places where people could be at their most free.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children play at the freshly built suburb of Thamesmead, south-east London, in 1969. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

His favourite building in London was the Hilton hotel at Heathrow airport, a clinical 1992 shed designed by modernist architect Michael Manser, which Ballard described as “a cross between a brain surgery hospital and a space station”. “I am always supremely happy sitting in its vast atrium,” he said in a 2003 interview, “where one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.”

China's richest man is building the first residential tower in London with its own five-star hotel and karaoke suite

It is this anaesthetising, liberating effect of modern architecture that is depicted so graphically in High-Rise, where the anonymity of the building, with its self-contained facilities managing every aspect of daily life, frees its residents to explore their most extreme desires. “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure,” we are told in the book. “It removed the need to repress every kind of antisocial behaviour, and left [the residents] free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses … Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An artist’s impression of the proposed One Nine Elms development in London. Photograph: Wanda Group

Even as it drives its occupants into a frenzy of violence and torture, incest and cannibalism, the building remains oddly seductive, its walls of corduroy concrete still strangely strokable. The beauty of its sculpted balconies, polished tile floors and bold 70s signage is only heightened by the debauched carnival of death and destruction that it has unleashed. Royal’s penthouse is gloriously of its time, with cream shag-pile carpet and a black leather-lined conversation pit, where naked flesh piles up in the film’s endless, nauseating party scenes.

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So what would Ballard have made of the current thicket of towers poking on to London’s skyline? There is One Nine Elms, funded by China’s richest man, the first residential tower in the capital with its own five-star hotel, where residents will be able to enjoy room service in the comfort of their own homes, and sing together in a luxury karaoke suite. Or the Aykon Tower , where everything from door handles to teacups will be designed by Donatella Versace, the ultimate branded lifestyle promoted as “a fantasy turned into reality.”

The author sadly didn’t live to see the Shard completed, but one wonders what he might have made of its £50m penthouses, the only place in London where you can actually look down on helicopters. Would he have been revolted? Or would he have found in their solid marble bathtubs and manta ray wallpaper the most thrilling setting ever conceived for one of his dark tales of social psychopathy? Its 72nd-floor viewing terrace, where the building’s glass walls splinter to a jagged ruin, would certainly make a fine backdrop for barbecued dog.

