Tall Stories: London's Modernist tower blocks

Dotted between the old brick and new glass of London's architecture are a few buildings still living the 20th-century dream of communal existence. There are drawbacks: no gas, high service charges, people all around. But there are also advantages, including great views, the feeling of existing within this city's history like Jonah within the whale, and people all around.

I am an architecture nut and a Barbican resident, which is a fine combination. Six months ago, I moved into a one-bedroom flat owned by a friend whose grandmother snapped it up when they were built, in the late 1960s, on a 40-acre bombsite just north of St Paul's Cathedral. Not everything was flattened: the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, where Oliver Cromwell married and John Milton is buried, still sits at the estate's centre, while the remains of the Roman city wall ('Barbecana' was Latin for a fortified outpost or gateway) dot the area.

The Barbican was built by the Modernist architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon under the influence of Le Corbusier, who famously wanted to level Paris and replace all those outdated old buildings with 'machines for living in' – utilitarian housing. Architecture, the Modernists believed, could change the way we lived; the Barbican was the largest-scale attempt to prove this. It was also a solution to a City almost devoid of inhabitants: only 48 people still lived in Cripplegate by the end of the war. The result was three 42-storey towers and low-rise buildings in brownish-grey concrete rising from walkways in impenetrable profusion (there are maps, but they are impene-trable, too). The layout works in the residents' favour. Not only do we have keys to private gardens, tennis courts and playgrounds, we are the only people who can reliably find the arts centre, the Museum of London, the restaurants and London's biggest conservatory after Kew.

Life here is like nowhere else, although not always in the sense the architects intended. There are full-time porters and an army of estate handymen (over 2,000 flats and 40 years old – there's a lot to fix). There is a Salvage Store, run by residents, to collect and re-distribute fixtures: the buildings are listed, so many elements (tiles, latches, dials and other such paraphernalia) are no longer made, and permission for any changes must be sought through the City of London. This makes re-decorating complicated, which may be why my landlord hasn't really attempted it. My cheery yellow shelves are too narrow for modern paperbacks; my oven is the original 1970s Credaplan (it works fine, but heaven help me if that changes, since the company is long extinct) and my sliding kitchen cupboards operate much like a Rubik's Cube and align correctly with about the same frequency. On the other hand, there is underfloor heating, daily rubbish collection and sumptuous gardens I never have to weed. Service charges, inevitably, are high, although it's the towers, appropriately enough, that have the highest. My seven-storey block varies from £2,000 to £4,000, depending on the size of the flat.

There's no charge for the views, though. The highest flats see across London, and even a humble block-dweller such as I am has the vista of the flats opposite. Although one of the oddities of the Barbican, which has a lot of second homers with City jobs, is that you rarely see real people: just figures through windows, or lost souls trying to get home, or to the arts centre. People are always at one remove – it's like a concrete version of the internet. A very concrete version.

Many people still find the design ugly, but its intentions were heroic: decoration, the Modernists believed, was decadent; less was more, and the starkness would celebrate a place with nothing to hide. Plainness of that kind is out of fashion now, but the Barbican has accrued a brutalist chic, and the prices that go with it (studios start at £250,000 and a tower penthouse is about £1.8 million). When it opened, however, incentives had to be offered to lure people in. 'The flats were pretty luxurious but the place was a building site,' says Margaret Turner, who moved there in 1969 because her father, like other bank executives, was offered inducements to take a lease. 'There were just diggers and cranes. And no shops. The whole Barbican smelled of malt because the Whitbread brewery on Chiswell Street was still operational.'

The Modernists' worship of Le Corbusier can seem weird, now that he is best known as the forefather of sink estates that give com-munal living a bad name. But go to Highpoint in Highgate and the best of his theories rise before you in gracious, unadorned white. Berthold Lubetkin, one of several émigré proponents of Modernism in 1930s London, was a disciple who surpassed his master ('an achievement of the first rank,' said Le Corbusier of Highpoint), creating this early example of the International style, engineered by Ove Arup, in 1935 for office machinery tycoon Sigmund Gestetner to house his staff. However, the two buildings, with their lush private gardens, tennis courts and heated pool, became too expensive for him. 'It was intended as communal living for the middle classes,' says Carolyn Parmenter, who, with her husband Dave Rowley, has lived in seven-storey Highgate I for 17 years. She is a civil servant,
he is a university lecturer; both are passionate about architecture. In September, during Open House weekend, they let in the hordes to admire the concertina-ing windows, latched kitchen cupboards (with zinc-lined flour drawer) and the bathroom suite with 'Shanks "Highpoint" ' printed on the sink. There is also a tiny laundry chute, just big enough for a lady's gloves.

Lubetkin's stylistic descendants couldn't afford some of his innovations, such as a cruciform structure that leaves the next flat's giant TV clearly visible (and, when the windows are open, audible) but means no adjoining walls. 'It's such a comfortable way of life,' says Carolyn. 'We have a full-time porter, apples from the garden, impromptu pool parties. And the intention was utopian: to design a better way of living, which we find incredibly cheering.' Bertolt Brecht once said that the carnage of the First World War trenches left survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom: in Highpoint, Lubetkin attempted to make that future literal.

Erno Goldfinger, another émigré Corbusier disciple, who finished Trellick Tower in 1972, surely learned from Lubetkin. 'This building is designed on a human scale, based on the way people like to live,' says Ash Drees, 54, a professional mandolin player who has 'watched the weather going past' on the 27th floor of Trellick since just before the 1987 storm hit – 'and we saw great patches of London go dark with the power cut.'

The views are extraordinary, the rows of little houses below a contrast to the slender brutalist slice of concrete. The Modernists didn't like embellishment but a side effect of building high is beauty outside – and for free, which appealed to their anti-hierarchical ethos.

Trellick's really clever innovation is the staggering of levels: corridors come every three floors, dotted with cheerily non-conformist front doors, of which one in three goes up a floor inside, one goes down and only the intermittent one-beds are on that floor (so Ash is really on level 28). There is no lush landscape but all flats boast a south-facing balcony. During a party, Ash once spotted two white-knuckled hands clutching his balcony's bars: someone had decided to execute pull-ups off the building 'and found he couldn't' so had to be hauled back in.

'Unlike vertically designed buildings, here you can ask your neighbours for a cup of sugar,' says Ash. Trellick, like the Barbican, still has council tenants ('Nobody buys on the lower floors, because they don't have views').