Golborne Road and Trellick Tower

Why is it significant?

Lift your eyes above the cafés of Golborne Road to the concrete giant on the skyline, with its slim separate tower of lifts joined to the main block by bridges, like a ladder leaning on a wall. That is Trellick Tower, and love it or hate it, nobody walks past it without an opinion.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Lift your eyes above the cafés of Golborne Road to the concrete giant on the skyline, with its slim separate tower of lifts joined to the main block by bridges, like a ladder leaning on a wall. That is Trellick Tower, and love it or hate it, nobody walks past it without an opinion.

Golborne Road first. In the 1960s and 70s Moroccan and Portuguese families settled here, and the street still smells of mint tea, grilled sardines and custard tarts. Locals sometimes call it Little Morocco. It is the unpolished end of Portobello, where the market spills over into furniture, bric-a-brac and second-hand everything.

Trellick Tower was designed by the Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger and completed in 1972, thirty-one storeys of social housing. Goldfinger was obsessed with light and space. The flats are split over two levels, so the corridors only need to run on every third floor, and almost every home gets windows on both sides. All the noisy machinery, lifts and rubbish chutes went into that separate service tower, crowned by a boiler house that looks like a sci-fi radio mast.

For years it had a terrible reputation. Vandalism, crime and broken lifts earned it the nickname the Tower of Terror, and Goldfinger's dream seemed to have failed. Then the residents themselves fought back, forming an association and pushing for a concierge and proper security. In 1998 the tower was listed at Grade II star, and the flats that nobody wanted became some of the most sought-after addresses for lovers of modern architecture.

And Goldfinger left one more mark. The story goes that Ian Fleming disliked his modernist houses in Hampstead, and borrowed his surname for the gold-obsessed villain of a certain spy novel. The architect was not amused. So your walk ends as it began, with a building that refused to disappear: from a Victorian theatre to a concrete tower, Notting Hill keeps reinventing itself.