It was not until the mid-1960s, twenty years after the end of the war and thirty since he had arrived in England, that Goldfinger finally gained his longed for commissions for large-scale public housing. The first, Balfron Tower in Tower Hamlets, was opened just three months before the Ronan Point explosion, which was the death knell for system-built housing. Balfron Tower, and its twin, Trellick Tower in West London, were conventionally constructed, but had detached circulation towers joined by walkways to the main body of the buildings; sheer concrete and slit-like apertures set a harsh tone. The aesthetic of the towers was forbidding in the extreme, a far cry from the polite Modernism of Willow Road or Albemarle Street, as far as the Smithsons’ Bethnal Green housing was from their urbane Economist Building in St James’s. The Goldfingers’ decision to live in Balfron Tower themselves for two months was a brilliant move: it endeared them (Ursula in particular, who noted down everything) to ‘my tenants’, as Goldfinger called them; it was excellent publicity for his beleaguered profession; and it made him something of a hero to a generation of progressively minded architectural students. But it was just a honeymoon.