If ever a building became a myth, it is London’s Trellick Tower. Built in north Kensington between 1968 and 1972 by an architect, Erno Goldfinger, whose name had earlier been borrowed by Ian Fleming for his Bond villain, today it is a listed building — so is officially good — and about to get a £4.6m revamp.

The upgrade to the building is being paid for by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but this is no ordinary council block. Some apartments in Trellick are now privately owned. They don’t change hands very often, but when they do, a three-bedroom example would fetch about £300,000.

Trellick Tower is an impressive edifice to approach, with canalside gardens around its base. This is still a fully functioning council building, with the usual proportion of deprived tenants, including a smattering of asylum seekers. But it is far from your average neglected tower block. The lobby — with an abstract grid of coloured-glass windows, recently restored — is immaculate and is manned by a concierge. The lifts all work, and don’t smell. Graffiti and vandalism are conspicuously absent.

Then again, I didn’t see every flat, or even every floor. Trellick Tower is very, very big. Big means 31 storeys high with a separate seven-storey wing, in total containing 217 flats and maisonettes.

Despite being beautifully made of hand-crafted, honey-coloured concrete, Trellick is more than 30 years old and starting to show it. It needs upgrading. Its internal pipes, wires and chutes are wearing out, its cedar window frames are starting to decay, it has had its share of bodged repairs. The foundations constantly flood. There’s work to be done.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea held a competition among some pretty serious architects for the contract. The winner was John McAslan and Partners, a practice with a reputation for reviving classic modern buildings, from the Peter Jones store in London’s Sloane Square to the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill, East Sussex.

I meet McAslan’s colleague Adam Brown and we take the lift to Martin Brady’s three-bedroom apartment high in the tower. The approach is dramatic — the lift tower stands separate from the main block, and you walk from the lift lobby across an enclosed walkway.

Brady, a university lecturer who lives with his wife and two young children, is one of the few owner-occupiers, having bought his flat five years ago, when they were much cheaper, from a previous tenant. Today, he says, tenants still have the right to buy — but such is the gap between the fixed £38,000 council discount to purchasing tenants and the flats’ market value, that few can afford to do so. “There are people here who are desperately poor,” says Brady.

“There’s a misconception that this place is trendy and full of affluent owners.”

It’s clear that if more of Trellick’s apartments were to find their way onto the open market, they would be snapped up, despite reservations by mortgage companies about lending on high-rise properties, and despite the fact that owners face steep service charges over the next five years to finance the improvements — up to £30,000 in the case of the biggest flats — which council tenants will not have to pay.

The views from Brady’s home are stunning. Because it is at the prow of the block, and the structure is only one flat wide, it has views on three sides. Apart from the views and the light, the rooms — grouped around a central hall — are reasonably generous, and ceilings a full 8ft high. You can slide a big glass door to open the living room up, but the flat can be surprisingly noisy.

The architects are determined that this project should amount to more than just the £4.6m of upgrading. “We’ve dug out the drawings and started to think about what’s wrong with it,” says Brown. “There are basic repairs that need to be done, but I’d very much like to look at the wider environment.”

I love the place. This isn’t just one of the last of the original generation of tower blocks, it is the best. But there is one mystery. Why is it called Trellick Tower? Who or what was Trellick? Nobody, but nobody, seems to know.

John McAslan and Partners, 020 7727 2663, www.mcaslan.co.uk

Trellick: the facts

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