Highpoint’s Festive Silhouette: Modernist Towers Over Highgate’s Carols and Christmas Glow

Carols in Pond Square is one of Highgate’s most beloved seasonal events, held outdoors in the centre of the village with communal singing rather than in a formal church setting. Residents and visitors gather in the early evening, often in early or mid‑December, to sing traditional carols accompanied by musicians, with collections typically supporting local causes and community projects. At the same time, Highgate hosts wider festive activity: a village‑wide Christmas atmosphere of late‑opening shops, informal parties in local venues and private gatherings in homes that turns the hilltop into a network of small celebrations.​

Highpoint’s residents sit at the intersection of these layers. The towers are only a short walk from Pond Square, so many households drift down from their flats for the singing before moving on to Christmas parties in pubs, community spaces or friends’ homes elsewhere in the village that same evening. In this way, Highpoint life folds seamlessly into the public festive rhythm: the towers are visible on the skyline as people sing, then quietly absorb those same singers back into stairwells and living rooms for more intimate seasonal socialising.​

A modernist backdrop to tradition

Architecturally, Highpoint was never designed with Christmas in mind, yet its form lends itself to seasonal expression. Long balconies and large windows allow trees, lights and candles to be seen from the street, creating vertical bands of illumination that complement the more traditional decorations around Pond Square and the High Street. The landscaped gardens and entrance courts, planted as part of Lubetkin’s original composition, take on a different character in winter: evergreens, bare branches and frosted lawns set a modernist foreground to the warm, historic fabric of the village behind.​

Inside, the generous living spaces that once attracted artists, actors and academics give scope for hosting small Christmas parties and gatherings. Historically, Highpoint’s resident profile included people such as architect Ernö Goldfinger and linguist Michael Ventris, who were used to salon‑style conversation and seasonal entertaining, embedding a culture of thoughtful, often internationalist discussion that naturally surfaces at year‑end. That tradition persists when today’s residents move from communal singing in Pond Square to living‑room debates about politics, the environment or the year’s events over festive food and drink.​

Heritage, memory and winter light

Highpoint’s heritage status adds another layer to its Christmas role. As a Grade I–listed landmark, it is frequently cited in local histories and walking tours as a key example of 20th‑century housing, and winter gives those stories a particular resonance. The towers’ stark white concrete and clean lines stand out more sharply against long December twilights, making them especially prominent in views from Highgate’s streets and from Hampstead Heath. For long‑term residents, the sight of Highpoint lit up at dusk has become part of their personal seasonal memoryscape, as familiar as the carols themselves.​

Community organisations and local writers often frame Highgate’s Christmas as a blend of old and new Georgian and Victorian streetscapes animated by modern traditions such as outdoor carol concerts, charity stalls and independent‑shop late openings. In that narrative, Highpoint functions as the architectural counterpart to those newer practices: a modernist structure that has, over nearly a century, become “heritage” in its own right and now quietly anchors contemporary customs such as Carols in Pond Square and concurrent Christmas parties.​

A seasonal meeting point between private and public

What makes Highpoint distinctive at Christmas is not that it hosts big public events, but that it bridges private and public celebration. Residents may decorate balconies, host parties in duplex apartments or gather on roof terraces when weather allows, while also turning out for shared village rituals in Pond Square. The same people who stand shoulder‑to‑shoulder singing outdoors can later be found looking back toward the square from their windows, the towers’ elevation offering a contemplative vantage over the festivities they have just helped to create.​

In this way, Highpoint I and II become part of Highgate’s seasonal choreography. The towers’ modernist heritage, their community‑minded spatial design and their long association with culturally engaged residents all feed into a Christmas pattern where communal singing, local parties and quiet domestic gatherings interlock. Highpoint does not simply overlook Christmas in Highgate; it participates in it, giving the village’s winter traditions a distinctive skyline and a living, inhabited symbol of 20th‑century optimism carried into each new festive season.