Highpoint’s Quiet Legacy: Modernist Towers Fueling Highgate’s Arts and Heritage Scene

Highpoint I and II, the pair of white modernist apartment blocks on Highgate Hill, are more than architectural curiosities; they are long-running engines for Highgate’s quiet arts and heritage culture. Completed in 1935 and 1938 for Sigmund Gestetner’s firm and designed by émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin with structural engineer Ove Arup, they introduced an unprecedented kind of collective living to north London, one that has consistently attracted residents involved in art, scholarship and conservation. Their presence continues to echo through small-scale exhibitions, heritage fairs and conservation days across the neighbourhood, giving Highgate’s cultural life a distinctly reflective, locally grounded tone.​

Highpoint as a modernist colony

Lubetkin conceived Highpoint I as a “vertical garden suburb,” with flats arranged to maximise light, air and views rather than corridor efficiency, a radical proposition in the mid‑1930s. The building’s thin slab form, continuous balconies, corner windows and shared roof terrace marked a break from London mansion block conventions and caught the attention of figures such as Le Corbusier, who praised the project on visiting soon after completion. Highpoint II, added a few years later, intensified this ambition with duplex apartments, a dramatic entrance canopy and sculptural columns referencing classical caryatids, making the ensemble an early, highly publicised statement of modernist domestic life in Britain.​

From the outset, the flats appealed to culturally engaged tenants. Archival accounts list residents including the actress and director Beatrix Lehmann, architect Ernö Goldfinger, archaeologist and linguist Michael Ventris and other professionals linked to publishing, architecture and academia. This pattern of occupancy established Highpoint as a kind of informal creative colony in Highgate, where domestic spaces doubled as studios, writing rooms and salons a social structure that still underpins how residents contribute to the area’s arts and heritage events.​

Views that feed the arts

The physical setting of Highpoint is inseparable from its cultural influence. The blocks sit on the Highgate ridge, looking out over Hampstead Heath in one direction and toward the City of London in the other, a dual orientation that has long attracted artists interested in landscape and urban change. Accounts of local walks and artist trails around Highgate frequently highlight Highpoint as a vantage point, both literally for sketching and metaphorically as a symbol of 20th‑century optimism set against older church spires and cemetery monuments nearby.​

This connection to the place is visible in low-key events such as the Highgate Watercolour Group Annual Exhibition at Lauderdale House, which in late 2025 presented around 200 works by 20 local artists. While exhibitors are drawn from across the area, many pieces focus on recurring subjects Highgate Hill, the Heath, the cemetery, older streets and the silhouette of Highpoint itself demonstrating how the towers have entered the visual vocabulary of neighbourhood painters. For residents who live inside these iconic forms, participating in such exhibitions effectively turns their daily outlook into shared heritage material, reinforcing the link between Highpoint’s architecture and Highgate’s gentle, observational art scene.​

Architecture as heritage educator

Highpoint’s own status as a Grade I listed site has made it a touchstone in local heritage education, reflected in how heritage organisations and open‑house programmes present the buildings. Open days and guided tours, often organised through architecture and landscape trusts, frame the complex not only in terms of design innovation reinforced concrete frame, carefully detailed communal spaces, landscaped gardens but also in relation to wider social histories of émigré architects, inter‑war housing reform and post‑war preservation campaigns. These narratives intersect with the ethos of smaller heritage gatherings in Highgate, where the emphasis tends to fall on layered stories rather than spectacle.​

Events such as the Heritage Fair at Lauderdale House bring together local museums, historical societies and initiatives like women’s history trail projects, all aiming to spotlight overlooked or fragile aspects of the area’s past. In this context, Highpoint’s journey from controversial modern intrusion to protected national monument serves as a case study in how perceptions of “heritage” evolve, a theme that surfaces in talks, displays and discussions hosted by local institutions. The buildings’ continued residential use, rather than conversion into exclusive offices or empty investment units, reinforces a message that living, inhabited sites can be at the heart of heritage practice.​

From hilltop gardens to Highgate Wood

The relationship between Highpoint and Highgate’s quieter heritage events also runs through environmental concerns. Lubetkin’s plan integrated garden courts, trees and a sense of permeability between built form and landscape, a response to the ridge’s geology and the proximity of Hampstead Heath. This long-standing attention to terrain and planting resonates with community-facing events such as the Highgate Wood Heritage Community Day, where conservation stalls, beekeeping demonstrations and nature walks focus on the fragility and stewardship of local green spaces.​

Although Highpoint is an architectural, not ecological, project, its design and ongoing maintenance embody similar themes: managing structural loads on unstable ground, preserving mature planting, and reconciling modern interventions with a sensitive hillside context. When residents of the towers engage with tree-planting projects, local conservation groups or information sessions at such heritage days, they bring a perspective shaped by living in a landmark that must itself be carefully managed against subsidence, weathering and invasive refurbishment. This makes Highpoint both a backdrop and a living example for discussions about responsible change in a historic landscape.​

A hub in a network of small events

Highgate’s cultural calendar leans heavily toward small-scale, repeat events hosted in modest venues: room-sized exhibitions at Lauderdale House, designer‑maker fairs under the banner “Handmade in Highgate,” and occasional open gardens or architecture days. Highpoint appears in this ecosystem directly when its flats or gardens are part of guided visits, and indirectly when its residents volunteer, exhibit or serve on committees for local societies and festivals. Organisers of the Highgate Festival, for example, routinely fold architecture walks and modernism‑focused events into programmes that otherwise feature talks, recitals and community workshops, ensuring that the story of Highpoint remains present in the wider narrative about the village.​

These activities maintain the towers’ visibility without turning them into mass‑tourism destinations. Visitor numbers remain limited, and most interactions take place in the form of guided groups, illustrated talks, or small exhibitions rather than large public spectacles. That scale matches the tone of Highgate’s arts and heritage gatherings more broadly: they are designed for conversation, learning and neighbourhood connection, not for drawing crowds from across the city. Within that context, Highpoint functions as a quietly influential anchor; an object of study for architecture enthusiasts, a recurring subject for local artists, and a lived example in debates over conservation and change.​

Quiet power of a modernist landmark

Taken together, Highpoint I and II show how a single architectural ensemble can shape the cultural life of a neighbourhood over decades, not through headline‑grabbing events but through steady engagement in modest forums. Their residents have included some of the 20th century’s most notable designers and thinkers, yet the towers’ current influence is felt as much in watercolour shows, heritage fairs and conservation days as in specialist architecture publications. In these quiet arts and heritage gatherings, Highpoint is both subject and catalyst, ensuring that modernism, landscape and local memory remain in dialogue on Highgate Hill.