‘I knew everyone here’: the tower block with 164 boarded-up homes – and a few residents who just won’t leave

Carpenters Estate V1 Tee Fabikun is sitting in an armchair in her cosy, homely flat, surrounded by her things – papers and letters, family photos, a few Nigerian handicrafts, a forest of houseplants by the window. She is telling me about her neighbours here on the fifth floor of Lund Point, a tower block on the Carpenters estate in Stratford, east London. Next door there’s “a grumpy old man”; well, she thought he was a grumpy old man, but then she saw him in the lift with his granddaughter and he was sweet with her, so maybe he’s not so bad. “There’s always two sides.” In the next flat along is a young couple who met in the building, maybe in that lift. She was living on a higher floor, but moved down and in with him when they got married, and rented out her place. Then there’s a Bangladeshi family who only speak a little English. Fabikun’s first contact with them was when their daughter knocked on the door holding out an exercise book and just said “homework”; after that Fabikun would often help with her studies. And so on. And it’s not just her immediate neighbours on the fifth floor that Tee knows; she knows pretty much everyone in the 21-storey block. Correction: make that knew, and e neighbours. Because today outside Fabikun’s flat on the landing it is neither cosy nor homely. It is cold, echoey, dirty, the paint is peeling, and the entrances to the seven other flats on the floor have been closed off with steel security doors. Fabikun’s flat is the only occupied one on the fifth floor. And it is the same throughout the building. Of the 168 flats in Lund Point, only four still have residents. View image in fullscreen Tee Fabikun in her flat in Lund Point. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Warren Lubin lives on the 20th floor (one lift is working, thankfully). He says it is a mess at the moment, so he’ll come down to Fabikun’s. They moved into the building around the same time, in 1997, and have been friends ever since. From outside, it is hard to believe anyone lives in Lund Point. Rubbish-filled supermarket trolleys have been dumped at the entrance. The tower itself is grubby and shabby, some cladding is missing, a couple of windows look broken. There is netting over most of the balconies, to stop the pigeons getting in – though they still do, says Lubin. Rats too. He doesn’t have netting – the council told him it doesn’t do that any more. So he has pigeons nesting on his balcony, and kestrels after the nestlings; he doesn’t mind the kestrels. Nor does he mind the 20-floor views. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve liked living here, the afternoon sun, the view facing westwards of London. Canary Wharf, the City, on a clear day all the way to the Wembley Arch.” View image in fullscreen Lund Point. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian But Lubin isn’t a massive fan of tower block living. He didn’t get to know many people when he moved in, in his 20s, instead keeping to himself. “I don’t know why people think we want to live in towers, or that they make communities. They don’t. It can be quite insular. People talk over the fence – that’s how they get to know their neighbours.” Later he got involved with various residents’ organisations and steering groups (he’s a tenant, Fabikun’s a leaseholder) and through their dealings with Newham council, Lubin became something of a spokesperson for the estate. Fabikun, on the other hand, has always been happy in Lund Point. “I knew everyone. If you got into the lift with someone you didn’t know, by the time you got out you knew each other.” Isn’t it scary, and lonely, rattling around in this nearly empty tower? Lubin says at least it means he can blast out his music as loud as he wants. Fabikun says she still feels safe. “It’s been my home for so many years, I love it. And once you’re inside your own flat, you don’t know what’s going on outside.” It’s true: sitting in Fabikun’s home, watching her watering her plants, you wouldn’t know that we were in a largely empty building. Or at the centre of what Chris Bailey of the campaign organisation Action on Empty Homes describes as “a scandal, an example of everything that’s wrong with estate regeneration”. In order to understand how Fabikun and Lubin got to this sorry place, it is necessary to look back at the history of the Carpenters estate, which began before Fabikun arrived from Nigeria, and before Lubin was born. Built in 1967-8 by Newham council as part of the postwar expansion of council housing, the 9.3-hectare (23-acre) estate consisted of three tower blocks – Dennison Point, James Riley Point and Lund Point – as well as low-rise housing: 710 homes in all. There was some apprehension about the towers, says Prof Paul Watt, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, “particularly after the partial collapse of the Ronan Point tower in the same borough in 1968. But it was better than living