Category: BUSINESS

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“It’s my concrete nest high in the sky, which turns orange as the sun sets,” says Dutch artist Joline Kwakkenbos of her 18th-storey flat in Arlington House, in the seaside town of Margate, Kent. One of four flats owned and let by the artist Tracey Emin, the white-walled, concrete-floored space looks west towards the haunting Reculver Roman fort that appears in many of JMW Turner’s paintings. “It’s like living in a moving painting, with a seagull that visits every morning,” says Kwakkenbos. 

Down on the 11th floor, overlooking the Dreamland amusement park, John Moss’s view is different. A 70-year-old former Thanet District Council employee, he has lived here since 2003 and has taken the building’s owner, Metropolitan Property Realizations Limited (MPRL), part of the Freshwater Group of Companies, to property tribunal 12 times. “We know it needs work and is difficult to manage,” he says. Grievances over the years have ranged from alleged excessive service charges for lift repairs to residents being charged for electricity used by mobile phone companies with masts on the roof. Ten have resulted in a reduction in costs and charges levied against residents. “A lot of people want the building knocked down,” Moss says. “It’s not exactly pretty from the outside.” But the “fight to have repairs done” is one he’s prepared to take on.

A hulking concrete monolith that has loomed over Margate’s train station and Main Sands since 1963, Arlington House is the town’s most divisive building. To some, it’s a greying, demolition-ready eyesore, and costly to maintain. Others argue it’s a modernist icon, pointing to architect Russell Diplock’s distinctive sawtooth facade, which echoes the waves below — each of the building’s 142 flats has almost wraparound sea views. In the context of a housing crisis, the government’s housebuilding targets of 1.5mn over five years, and concerns over embodied carbon, it’s one of the starkest examples of the central tension over brutalist high-rises in the UK. 

None of this was quite the plan when the Catford-born Bernard Sunley bought the land in 1961 to construct a “park-and-buy shopping centre with luxury flats”. Sunley had gone from building airfields during the second world war to becoming one of Britain’s most prominent property developers, but was terminally ill when he submitted drawings — inspired in part by travels in Cuba and Florida, and his previous developments in the Bahamas — for the plot that included a shopping arcade, a restaurant, a theatre and a rooftop swimming pool. Though the latter two didn’t make it into Diplock’s final designs, the building opened in December 1963 with a Carrara marble and teak lobby, and crisp white concrete cladding with mica flakes that reflected the sunlight.

But riots between rival youth groups mods and rockers in the spring of 1964 dented Margate’s appeal, and in July 1964 it was mockingly reported in the Daily Mirror that just one person lived at Arlington House. Sunley died later that year, and in 1969, MPRL took over the building. Today, the portfolio of its primary business, Daejan Holdings, includes London apartment blocks and prime commercial buildings, including Holborn’s Africa House, and several addresses on Oxford Street. The founding Freshwater family is reportedly worth around £2.6bn.

Many buildings like Arlington House emerged after the second world war — often erected by councils that needed to replace bombed buildings with high-density housing. In many cases there was a utopian vision: often they were conceived as Le Corbusier-influenced “streets in the sky”. The reality was sometimes quite different.

It’s one of the most architecturally amazing developments of the 1960s. The folded facade is special, and there’s a remarkable quality of space and light inside the flats

Making high-rise brutalist homes and buildings fit for purpose in the 21st century is complicated and expensive — especially in the wake of 2022’s Building Safety Act, designed to avoid a repeat of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 by reforming regulations for new and existing buildings. Cladding has taken most of the headlines, with the National Audit Office estimating it will cost £16.6bn to fix unsafe cladding on tall buildings in England — but the regulations have brought a sharp focus on all high-rise buildings. 

Their fate tends to fall into two camps. Scores of brutalist tower blocks have faced the wrecking ball over the years, including at least a third of Glasgow’s infamous “sink estates” and Poplar’s Robin Hood Gardens, an east London council housing estate designed by prominent architects Alison and Peter Smithson. But a handful of blocks have gained listed status, including, in London, the Barbican Estate and Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick and Balfron Towers. 

Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns for the protection of buildings, says that Arlington House should be listed, even though a 2011 application to English Heritage failed. “It’s one of the most architecturally amazing developments of the 1960s,” she says. “The folded facade is special, and there’s a remarkable quality of space and light inside the flats.” In a statement last year, Emin said: “If this building were in any European town or city it would have been protected from the beginning.” 

That’s also the view of many residents in a building where the demographic has shifted, in many ways reflecting the gentrification of Margate itself. While Moss says that the vast majority of residents were retirees when he moved here in 2003, newer arrivals include younger artists, architects and government special advisers.

On the 14th floor, fashion photographer Oliver Marshall describes his west-facing flat “as a mid-century dream that’s second only to living in the Barbican”. Just along the corridor is Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, who runs the Arlington House Instagram account dedicated to a building, he says, that “speaks to a moment of vision and optimism in Britain”. The flat he shares with his partner, art dealer Mattias Vendelmans, boasts shimmering mirrored wall panels and Eileen Gray furniture, and was featured on the cover of World of Interiors magazine last year. 

And yet, for many, the narrative around Arlington House is of spalling concrete, rotting windows and derelict public spaces — including a ground-floor shopping arcade where the remaining joke shop, doughnut shop and tattoo parlour closed in 2009 to make way for a Tesco supermarket that never materialised.

Some residents have long been at odds with MPRL and building managers Highdorn, both part of the Freshwater Group. As well as tribunals over service charges, including a 2019 case that resulted in around £105,000 being refunded to leaseholders, there have also been disagreements around maintaining the building’s mid-century aesthetic. Last year, Emin was part of a high-profile campaign to block MPRL’s plans to replace the original aluminium sliding windows with modern tilt-and-turn windows, which the artist argued were “bulky, unsuitable and inappropriate” and would have “ruined the facade”. 

These grievances are coming to a head this autumn, with residents potentially facing a bill of around £5.3mn, which Moss alleges could mean an average of more than £37,000 per flat — more than some paid for their homes — to pay for significant issues including repairs to the exterior and roof, and a faulty fire alarm system. It’s a response to a Hazard Awareness Notice issued by the Building Safety Regulator and Thanet District Council earlier this year.

“The charges are unreasonable,” alleges Tom Bradshaw, an ecommerce manager who lives on the 18th floor with his partner Jake Bland, and is the new head of the building’s residents’ association. He points to an estimated £1.2mn charge for scaffolding. “There’s a lack of proper communication, which is stressful for those who can’t afford the kinds of sums involved.” 

Arlington House is far from alone as a brutalist block facing maintenance challenges and escalating costs. Refurbishments of Poplar’s Balfron Tower have been widely criticised, with Croft labelling the result an “ersatz hybrid”. The building has been in the news recently for its two lifts breaking down, leaving some disabled residents stranded in their flats. “There is often a lot of short-termism and lack of maintenance with these kinds of buildings,” says Croft. “They are difficult to organise and manage, and often freeholders don’t understand how to sensitively tackle their very specific problems.”

At the Grade II-listed Golden Lane Estate in the City of London, by the same architects as the nearby Barbican, the quote for a mass refurbishment of the 559-home 1950s estate has ballooned from £29mn to £105mn; partly the result of more extensive fire safety and fabric repair works to meet Building Safety Act standards. With approximately half of the estate privately owned, it’s unclear how the cost might be split between leaseholders and the City of London. 

To some, demolition is the answer. Alongside a report last year on the UK’s high-rise buildings by the Policy Exchange think-tank, journalist Peter Hitchens questioned the “rash and much-regretted tower-block frenzy of the 1960s”, saying that his instinctive reaction was to “pull [tower blocks] all down if I could”, before conceding that another way was possible. Create Streets, a research institute and think-tank founded by Nicholas Boys Smith, has long argued that London’s high rises should be replaced with low-rise terraced homes.

But there are also examples of well-received repurposing projects. Developer Urban Splash has twice been nominated for the Stirling Prize, in 2013 and 2024, for its ambitious regeneration of Sheffield’s vast Park Hill estate, which is listed. Originally built in 1961 with 1,160 dwellings inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, a two-phase project costing more than £100mn has remodelled much of the estate, adding student accommodation, workspaces and space for businesses including a nursery and café.

At Arlington House, there may be little hope for a change of listing status — though whether that would be a blessing or a curse remains in doubt given the jump in costs generally involved in maintaining a listed building. But there is at least a sense of momentum behind an increasingly passionate and motivated group of residents — who have taken on their own role as a quasi protection committee. 

David and Elizabeth Walker are among the building’s more active residents. They met while working at an architecture firm, and have lived on the 16th floor since 2017, enjoying the “Where’s Wally?”-esque scenes around the station below almost as much as the sunsets.

With experience of contracting for major architectural projects, they’ve recently been digging into the small print of the £5.3mn quote, including the possibility of using mast climbers — platforms that move up and down a vertical mast, and would have less of a visual impact than scaffolding — for the exterior works.

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Like so many at Arlington House, they’re spurred on by a love for the building. “It’s such a crisp architectural statement, even more so because it feels slightly out of place,” says David. “A lot of the people who hate it have never been inside. It’s not just the light in the flats that we love, but the really interesting mix of people who live in the building. The WhatsApp group can get spicy, but it’s generally such a friendly and supportive community.

“It’s hard not to imagine what it could be like if it were properly refurbished, and shown some love,” he adds, noting that a clean could see the building returned to its original white. “It could be a true icon, in all the right ways.”     

MPRL/Highdorn didn’t respond to requests to comment

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