One letter to the Glasgow Herald begged the town planners to be reasonable: "Human beings are not bees or ants. Why in the middle of the 20th century should they be denied their simple wish for a little home of their own on God's earth? Letchworth and Welwyn have shown what can be done."

In 1948, Mass Observation conducted a survey of working-class people and their homes. This response from a 50-year-old working woman living with a husband and four children in an upper-floor tenement flat was typical: "I'd like a sitting-room-kitchen, so that you could have meals in it, and a nice garden at the back for vegetables and chickens, and a flower garden in front." From interviews such as these, the report concluded: "the ‘dream home' of the majority is still the small modern suburban house." Such views were steamrollered by men like the influential economist Philip Sargant Florence who wrote that "architects and planners must give the lead and the target must be placed higher than the inarticulate yearnings of the average working-class housewife." The battle had been lost. The little home with a garden full of chickens was replaced by the 28th-floor flat with a balcony.

The hero of the high-rise was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who seduced a generation of British architects with his visions of tower blocks 60 storeys high. Le Corbusier's disciples gave us Park Hill in Sheffield, Cruddas Park in Newcastle (where the 15-storey towers were given improbable names like the Poplars, the Hawthorns and the Sycamores) and the 11-storey blocks of Cumbernauld on a wind-battered promontory in North Lanarkshire. In London, Le Corbusier's legacy was responsible for the 22-storey Ronan Point, which famously collapsed after a gas explosion in 1968, and Ernő Goldfinger's Balfron and Trellick Towers, 27 and 31 storeys respectively.   

Goldfinger was a Hungarian émigré with a take-no-prisoners architectural practice. He was a notorious bully who routinely fired recruits on their first day and behaved appallingly towards women. In Concretopia, John Grindrod quotes the account of one site agent who had worked with the architect and predicted ominously: "One day he will fall off a roof." Architect James Dunnett who worked for the practice in the 1970s told Grindrod: "I didn't expect anything less. I thought that anyone who designed buildings with that amount of punch in them is not going to be a sop."

And punch you they do.

Trellick Tower glowers over west London. Anyone driving into the city along the Westway does so beneath its forbidding hulk. It has a mechanised, military silhouette, like an AK-47 balanced on its stock. Its defining feature, shared with its twin Balfron Tower, is a 394ft detached lift shaft linked to every third floor by an aerial walkway. Today its poured-concrete facing is pitted and pock-marked. 

Did this Brutalist building brutalise the people who lived in it? There were problems from the moment it opened its door to tenants in 1972. A fire hydrant was deliberately opened, flooding the lifts with thousands of gallons of water and cutting off power to the whole building. A 27-year-old woman was dragged from the lifts and raped. A young mother killed herself jumping from one of the balconies. An 11-year-old girl was attacked in the chute room, where residents disposed of their rubbish. Vagrants moved in and condoms, syringes and broken bottles littered the corridors.