Every time a council tenant decided to cash in, my estate agent would give me a call to see if I knew of an architect who might be persuaded to buy.

That's Isabel Allen, on the 4homes blog, writing about her previous home in the Brunswick Centre. But Brunswick's success, she argues, isn't about the architecture, it's about the location. And it's the location - again, not the Brutalist architecture - that's at the heart of Robin Hood Gardens' failure.

The estate (a Utopian streets-in-the-sky dream by husband-and-wife architectural team Alison and Peter Smithson, built in Poplar, east London, at the start of the 1970s) is threatened with demolition, and not everybody's delighted. It's not in a great place (knocking it down won't help), and it's structurally and socially flawed... but once it's gone it will be gone forever, and there'll come a time when a new generation will pour over the photographs and shake their heads in disbelief... they just tore it down? Yes, son, they just tore it down, replaced it with cheap-and-easy apartments for the middle classes, their development chums making small fortunes in the process, and sent the original tenants scattering...

Technorati Tags: architecture, London, property, real estate