The residents pleaded for security on the main doors to keep rough sleepers out. The Greater London Council rejected plans to have a concierge in the lobby. It would have been "fascist", they said, to snoop on residents. They had complete faith that this city in the sky would be a socialist utopia. Goldfinger was unrepentant. "I built skyscrapers for people to live in and now they messed them up. Disgusting." 

Such callous disregard for the families who had to live in his buildings brought him enemies. Ian Fleming borrowed Goldfinger's name for one of his James Bond villains. The architect, citing anti-Semitism as well as defamation, threatened to sue. Fleming retaliated with an instruction to his publishers to change the character's name to Goldprick. Fleming wasn't the only writer to attack Goldfinger in print. J.G. Ballard's dystopian science fiction novel High Rise, published in 1975, is set in a 300ft-high housing block with 1,000 flats. "People in high-rises," writes Ballard, "tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them." The tower descends into chaos as the residents rape, murder, enslave and cannibalise each other. "I'm frightened to step into an elevator by myself," says one mother. The building's star architect Anthony Royal, who lives in the penthouse apartment, forces the desperate female residents into his harem and makes their children his servants. 

This was a deliberate strike against Goldfinger, who had briefly lived in a flat on the 25th floor of Balfron Tower. "I want to experience at first hand," he explained, "the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whistling around the tower, and any problems which might arise from my designs, so I can correct them in the future." He lived in Flat 130 for two months before returning to his large, detached house in Willow Road, Hampstead. His residents had no such choice. 

Throughout the 1970s, Trellick continued its downward trajectory. It was known as the Tower of Terror or Colditz in the Sky. The MP Alan Johnson, who grew up in tenement housing at the far end of the Golborne Road, described Trellick Tower in his memoirs This Boy as "casting its gaze across the capital like the Eye of Mordor".

It wasn't until the 1980s that the Tower's fortunes began to change. CCTV cameras and an entryphone were finally installed and a concierge was employed to monitor the lobby and deter the homeless men who had slept in the tower's corridors. In 1984, a new residents' association was formed. They campaigned for new lifts, a children's playground and an improved water heating system. 

And, of course, Margaret Thatcher's Right To Buy scheme, introduced in 1980 began slowly to change the make-up of the tower. Former residents, disenchanted with the tower moved out; yuppies, taken with the idea of living in an "icon" of 20th-century Modernism moved in. The tower's place in architectural history was assured when it was Grade II listed in 1998. Today, just over 20 per cent of Trellick's flats are privately owned. At the time of writing, a two-bedroom flat was on the market for £400,000.

Interior designer Bella Huddart, 50, is typical of the new tenants. She is evangelical about Goldfinger's design. The narrowness of the tower ensures every flat is double-aspect. The bedrooms get the light from the east in the mornings; the kitchen and sitting room see the sun setting over the Westway in the evening. The views from her 16th-floor flat are indeed spectacular. 

She says it is a mistake to think of Goldfinger's design as a uniform gunshot grey. On a tour of the building she points out the coloured glass inset into the walls of the lobby and the different tiles on each floor: lemon yellow, royal blue, cream, ivy. When I visit she is in the middle of painting her bathroom a characteristic Goldfinger green. And she points out his eye for detail: the brushed metal light switches and door handles, which, since the building was listed, cannot be changed.