She insists she has never felt threatened. If the hoodies who loiter outside the main doors cause trouble they no longer do so on home turf. She does, however, point out the number of flats with locked metal grills in front of their doors, a legacy of the bad old days. 

When Amber Guinness, a 24-year-old art student, first moved in last year, her mother sent her a newspaper clipping about needles on the floor and residents being stabbed in the lifts. But she has come to feel fond of Trellick's emerald green doors. "I used to see it from afar and think it was hideous. But it becomes more beautiful when you move in."

She speaks warmly of the artists who are drawn to the tower. An "upcycled" furniture shop, the Goldfinger Factory, has opened in one of the ground-floor units. Next to it, Redemption, a "mocktail" lounge, sells non-alcoholic drinks and vegan dishes. Sweet potato and celeriac curry and plantain pancakes with agave syrup are on the menu the night I visit. Rellick, a vintage clothing boutique, sells Ossie Clark dresses and Valentino ballgowns to starlets to wear on the red carpet. Smart homeware boutiques on the Golborne Road offer tea-towels printed with graphic silhouettes of the tower.  

Barrister Richard Samuel bought his flat in 1999. His is one of the coveted end-of-corridor flats with triple-aspect views. After 15 years he is moving to Fulham. What was ideal in his twenties has become less desirable in his forties. "That's a problem with Modernism as a whole — it isn't really designed for families." He admits that the common parts remain grim and oppressive. On the January evening that I visit, the long, under-lit, concrete corridors and aerial walkways are indeed chilly and unwelcoming.  

But, says Samuel, "If you put aside the common parts-failures of Modernism all around-the flats are stupendous. You're surrounded by light-almost too much light-and the horizon. And how often do you see the horizon in a city?' 

In the closing chapter of his immensely readable — if unfailingly positive — account of postwar architecture, John Grindrod draws the conclusion that Trellick was one of its success stories. But a success in whose eyes? For design students, architects and historians of the Brutalist movement it is a triumph of Modernism. For those who lived there in the lawless 1970s and 80s, especially those with young children, it was purgatory. 

Alan Johnson is convinced that tower blocks were a "disaster". The condemned tenements he grew up in along the Golborne Road were replaced by tower blocks that presented as many problems as they solved. "You took a very poor community and put them in a vertical community that just didn't work. Cities in the sky seemed like a bright idea but they became breeding grounds for crime and anti-social behaviour." The working-class housewife who dreamed of a garden in which to keep chickens, grow vegetables and watch her children play, was betrayed by the failed utopian visions of Le Corbusier and Ernő Goldfinger.