In an oral history interview a resident presented me with a photograph taken from their balcony during the filming of 28 Days Later. It showed bloodied mannequins strewn across the podium of the tower and in the children's playground.

In Danny Boyle’s harrowing sci-fi horror 28 Days Later, we view a deserted London through the haunting and gritty lens of digital video cameras giving the immediacy of a documentary. Jim and Selina wander abandoned streets, survivors of a virus that has spread to humans turning them into 'the infected’, frothing killers that attack in vicious bands. Balfron Tower offers the couple temporary salvation. They scale a barricade of upturned shopping trolleys - “What is it about tower blocks and shopping trolleys?” Jim asks - and escape zombies on the stairwell, climbing all the way to reach a candlelit top-floor flat occupied by a father and his daughter, the iron-gated number 157. 

Without running water, they visit the roof strewn with buckets and plastic sheeting to collect rainwater, but have to leave as the threat of attack grows by the day. “Sound carries in this flat, you know, jerry-built I suppose.”