Silent Witness: Where is Heron Point? The story behind west London's Trellick Tower

Viewers settling down to Silent Witness this week will have spotted a familiar landmark playing a major part in the story.

Trellick Tower has been a notable feature of Kensal Town in west London since it was built in the early 1970s. Visible from the Westway - the major road in that goes through Acton and Notting Hill into Paddington, the distinctive design, with the connected service tower which has lifts, stairs and rubbish chutes, means it is instantly recognisable.

In Silent Witness it is Heron Point, a down-at-heel block run by the fictional Thamesmead Council, which against advice was used to house the homeless - a decision which has deadly ramifications years later.

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Trellick Tower is a Grade II* listed tower block on the Cheltenham Estate in North Kensington, London. Opened in 1972, it was commissioned by the Greater London Council and designed in the Brutalist style by architect Ernő Goldfinger.placeholder image
Trellick Tower is a Grade II* listed tower block on the Cheltenham Estate in North Kensington, London. Opened in 1972, it was commissioned by the Greater London Council and designed in the Brutalist style by architect Ernő Goldfinger. | Getty Images

The insalubrious scenes from the show - and the tower’s Brutalist architecture - may suggest that it is a no-go area - but in fact Trellick Tower is nowadays very much a des res. The 175-flat tower was the highest residential building in Europe when it was finished, and to this day its 31 storeys make it the tallest building in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

It was designed by Hungarian born architect Erno Goldfinger, who created several other London blocks, including the Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets and Carradale House in Poplar - both of which also have the connected tower.

At the time Trellick Tower’s appearance divided people - quoted on the Trellick Tower website Brian Westbury says: “When Trellick Tower went up it was very unpopular. It didn’t matter whether it was by a famous architect or not. People generally hated it. It was seen as soulless and an eyesore in relationship to the largely human scale three storey buildings.”

However, others, more open to the austere forms that Brutalism took, enjoyed its stark appearance. The tower was named one of the ugliest buildings in the world by the Financial Times, in 1984.

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While flats can sell for near £1m prices now, it was not always so. The tower did have a bad reputation in the late 1970s and council tenants were said to be reluctant to move in. Many flats were bought under the Thatcher government’s Right to Buy scheme which saw a residents association formed, and the knock-on effect from Notting Hill’s transformation - what had been a diverse, working class area became a favourite with celebrities and the media set in the 1990s - saw the wider area gentrified.

The tower and its distinctive design repeatedly pops up in popular culture, as it has in Silent Witness this week. You could see it in BBC promo pieces for the 2012, and Blur’s Best Days from the 1995 album The Great Escape mentions it in passing: “Trellick Tower's been calling / I know she'll leave me in the morning.”

You can also see the tower in the 2014 Paddington film, as well as in 1987’s cult comedy Withnail and I. It is also thought to have been the inspiration for the JG Ballard dystopian novel High Rise, which was made into a movie by British film-maker Ben Wheatley in 2016.

Currently there is a three-bedroom apartment on sale for £900,000 - but even the estate agent’s blurb describes Trellick Tower as “infamous”.

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