In 1937, Goldfinger designed a terrace of three houses on Willow Road, facing Hampstead Heath. The central house was for his own family: it was flat-roofed and concrete-framed, and replaced some derelict cottages. Local opposition, orchestrated by the future Conservative home secretary, Henry Brooke, was fierce. Goldfinger – assisted by such influential neighbours as Roland Penrose, Flora Robson and Julian Huxley – successfully defended his design, citing its kinship to the formal articulation and clarity of the Georgian terrace. ‘Only the Esquimeaux and Zulus,’ he said, ‘build anything but rectangular houses.’ The houses were duly built, became widely admired as a paradigm of architectural virtue, and, when 2 Willow Road was presented to the National Trust in the mid-1990s, it was Henry Brooke’s son Peter, the heritage secretary, who performed the ceremony.