Concrete estate towers linked by covered bridges stand beside older brick terraces, with Canary Wharf's glass towers rising just to the south.
What Poplar looks like
runs wide and straight, with brick terraces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries standing right beside concrete council blocks. Ivy has taken over the front of some of the older houses, their low garden walls tagged with graffiti and cars parked nose to tail along the kerb.
rises twenty seven storeys in bare poured concrete on St Leonard's Road. Its lift and stair core forms a separate block, joined to the flats by covered bridges at every third floor. Inside, the bridges are plain corridors of exposed aggregate concrete and red tile flooring, lit by strip windows down both sides.
Chrisp Street Market sits under its own 1952 clock tower, a plain brick and glass structure at the centre of a pedestrian square. , a brick estate block with a taller concrete tower alongside it, stands directly behind the market's shopfronts. Traffic lights and iron railings mark the road junction in front.
Older institutional buildings survive among the estates. A stone fronted college building with arched windows and a colonnade stands on Poplar High Street. The former George Green School on East India Dock Road dates from 1884, its clock added later in 1928 above a red brick tower and Gothic doorway.
Canary Wharf's glass towers stand close enough to the south to rise behind these older rooflines in a single frame. At Blackwall Basin, houseboats and narrowboats moor against a backdrop of glass residential towers still under scaffolding, the water reflecting the cranes above.
Shot in Poplar
28 Days Later used Balfron Tower's own podium and children's playground for the scene where Jim and Selina take shelter in a tower block, dressing both with bloodied mannequins. A resident photographed the dressed set from their own balcony during the shoot.
28 Days Later, 2002
Balfron Tower
Jim and Selina scale a barricade of shopping trolleys to reach the tower in the film's story, and the production dressed Balfron Tower's own podium and playground below with bloodied mannequins for the shots filmed there. The stairwell and flat scenes that follow were filmed at a different tower block, since demolished. Street View
What Poplar can double for
North Kensington in London, United Kingdom
Trellick Tower, built by the same architect Erno Goldfinger five years after Balfron, has the same Brutalist plan of a separate concrete lift and stair block joined to the tower by covered bridges. The two towers are hard to tell apart on camera without a shoot at Balfron itself. Trellick's service tower sits at one end of the block rather than the centre. Golborne Road market runs underneath it rather than a dual carriageway, so a wide establishing shot gives the difference away. Try searching Brutalist concrete tower block now.
Park Hill in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Park Hill's long concrete access decks and stepped blocks carry the streets in the sky idea that Poplar's own postwar estates were built for. Whole runs of deck and stair tower stand unaltered on the estate's north side. The estate steps down a hillside rather than sitting flat. Sheffield's own skyline stands behind it rather than Canary Wharf's towers, so a high or wide shot needs a different backdrop. Try searching concrete estate access deck now.
Corviale is a single concrete housing block nearly a kilometre long, built between 1975 and 1982 in the same raw poured concrete finish and repeated balcony grid as Poplar's own estates. A production gets a far longer run of unbroken concrete facade here than at any one Poplar block. The block stands alone at the edge of Rome with open country behind it rather than a dense street grid, so anything wider than a facade shot needs careful framing to hide the setting. Try searching single concrete housing block now.
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