Strange how Alexander Fleming House has ceased to be a high-rise, concrete horror now that developers can make money from it

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy "A resistance worker who escaped from Nazi Germany just before the Second World War died when a fire raged through his studio house, an inquest heard today." The death of 87-year-old Hans Aberbanell, "an antiquities expert", who worked underground with his wife from occupied Czechoslovakia helping fellow Jews to escape Hitler, did not make national news. By chance, my raucous deregulated bus took me past the Elephant and Castle in south London, where Alexander Fleming House, the former headquarters of the DHSS, is being converted into "luxury flats" for bright young things, many from Hong Kong and Korea, who have never had to worry about domestic heating arrangements much less needed the financial safety net offered by the social services. Alexander Fleming House was designed by the late Erno Goldfinger, a Jewish emigre from Hungary who built extraordinary "Brutalist" local authority housing blocks that gave poor Londoners sophisticated homes to rent of a quality rarely found elsewhere in Britain in the Sixties and Seventies.