A single photograph of the Lambeth Towers — a residential block in south London that represents the mass housing programme that defined British council architecture through the 1960s and 70s. The tower stands at the intersection of the A-road network, its concrete face marked by decades of weathering, the window pattern a regular grid interrupted by the irregularities of lived occupation.
Buildings like this one were built in their thousands across postwar Britain. They were simultaneously the most ambitious social project in British history and, when stripped of adequate maintenance budgets and management, the site of enormous human difficulty. The photograph captures a building at rest between those two readings.