Its concrete tower blocks were crumbling, the peasant housing like slums, and the infrastructure chronically rundown.
And improvements to the tower blocks are paid for out of a special ten-year fund.
The BBC does not have a list of which tower blocks the LFB itself rates as high risk.
Tower blocks are not intrinsically bad places to live, reckons Anne Power of the London School of Economics (LSE).
And the political climate is no longer conducive to building new tower blocks.
The section dropped 50ft (15m) from the side of Derby House, one of six tower blocks in the Sloane Village on Sunday.
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Foreboding council estates and concrete tower blocks overlook rundown high streets full of fried chicken shops and stalls offering knock-off mobile phones.
The centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin has accelerated a renovation programme for tower blocks, which covers 600 of the worst banlieues.
And when the council was planning a face-lift for the tower blocks, it asked the police which designs would best prevent crime.
But as soon as the white working-class inhabitants of architecturally enlightened tower blocks gain any control over the matter, they tend to move to the suburbs.
What was regarded as cheap and tacky, like the stained glass front door, had a renaissance after modernist architecture and its tower blocks were deemed a failure.
Delhi's organising committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi insists progress has been made in cleaning up the athletes' accommodation and they are ready to receive the 7, 000 visitors to the 32 tower blocks.
Freedom of Information requests sent by BBC London have now revealed that many tower blocks rated as high risk by local authorities received no visits at all from the LFB last year.
Sutton House was built in 1535, when King Henry VIII ruled over England and this part of London -- now busy with cars and tower blocks -- was set against miles of open grassland.
At least 21 London tower blocks rated as a high fire risk by local councils were not visited by firefighters last year - despite flawed visits being a factor in the fatal Lakanal House fire.
China's capital may be racing towards the future at breakneck speed but sneak behind one of the city's glittering, ultra-modern tower blocks and you find a slice of old Beijing that seems to have been lost in time.
But now, smart new government-built tower-blocks in red and grey are sprouting to house the homeless and give work to the unemployed.
One is the establishment of virtual ghettos, be these either the tower-blocks of the suburbs, built from the 1950s onward with the noble intention of providing cheap housing for migrants and other new city-dwellers, or the squalid medieval centres of towns in the south such as Carpentras.
It's snazzy stuff for a venerable, white-shoe firm so taciturn that it omits the Goldman name on its headquarters tower a few blocks south of Wall Street.
We had set a point where we were going to meet, which would be about two blocks from where the tower was.
At New York by Geary, the 76-story tower on Spruce Street a few blocks from City Hall, 80% of the building is now taken, said Danny Charles, a spokesman for Citi Habitats, which is renting it out.
With its prime location on Sule Pagoda Road, the most expensive street in Rangoon, Sakura Tower is the oldest and among the highest-priced office blocks in the city.
On September 11, 2001, Kathryn Freed watched from two blocks away as a plane hit the World Trade Center's north tower.
And as she headed back toward her apartment, four blocks from what was soon to be known as ground zero, the south tower collapsed, sending a plume of debris into the air and straight down her street.
During the storm, on 22 January, blocks of up to half a tonne smashed through the church's roof and lodged in the bell tower.
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