The high-rise home: verticality as practice in London

This paper investigates the relationship between verticality and home. It develops the idea ‘verticality as practice’. This appreciates verticality not as something that takes place in three dimensional landscapes but that is the outcome of everyday practical activity. Through a modernist high-rise estate, the Aylesbury Estate in London, the paper identifies and examines a range of vertical practices and illustrates how they are intertwined with home. Vertical practices, such as those associated with the view, helped to make a unique and special home that became intensely meaningful to residents. However, they also unmade dimensions of home when they interacted with the estate’s marginality