There are few places that provide such a vivid microcosm of London’s gentrification as the Balfron Tower, Ernö Goldfinger’s concrete cliff-face in Poplar. Built as a beacon of social housing in 1968, this heroic 27-storey bookend to east London has been “decanted” of its social tenants over the last few years, to allow it to be scrubbed up and transformed into a silo of luxury flats – which will be marketed to the bankers of nearby Canary Wharf. The proceeds will go towards building low-rise social housing units nearby, in the shadow of the tower’s great heft.

The process began in 2008, and the interim period has been characterised by the usual medley of arts-led temporary uses, to distract from the sore of a vast concrete carcass lying empty. Well-meaning local arts organisation, the Bow Arts Trust, has supplied a ready flow of artists eager to fill the flats on short-term tenancies as they have been vacated, while property guardianship company, Dot Dot Dot, has filled a similar number of flats with its guardians. They pay for the pleasure of providing security, with none of the rights of being a tenant – but for the chance to live in a grade II-listed brutalist masterpiece, it’s a compromise many are willing to make.

As residents have battled their displacement, their plight has been framed against a backdrop of arts events, in a kind of live gentrification jamboree. There have been pop-up galleries and impromptu supper clubs, 24-hour theatre performances and a weekend branded as a “vertical carnival,” concluding with an architectural symposium on the roof – from which one artist also proposed to hurl a piano, before her plan was damned as an act of crass lunacy. All the usual actors of regeneration have been paraded through the building, the artist-tenants performing their valiant role as the kamikaze agents of real estate “value uplift”, enjoying a last hurrah on the deck of the brutalist Titanic.

Now this six-year carnival is coming to a head, with the momentously named Balfron Season. Running until mid-October, it is another festival of activity organised by Bow Arts, the housing association Poplar Harca (responsible for the tower and 9,000 properties in the 4 sq mile area around), and the Legacy List, the spawn of the Olympic public arts vehicle. It will see a further vibrant programme of pop-up cash-ins, from an “experimental dining experience,” featuring a six-course tasting menu for £40, to an evening of “East End bingo”. But the thing that jumps out from the usual line-up of workshops and panel discussions is an unlikely alliance with the National Trust, which will be staging its very own Poplar pop-up for the next two weeks.

Enter doyens of design nostalgia, Wayne Hemingway and his daughter Tilly, who previously refurbished the interior of Ringo Starr’s aunt’s former house in Liverpool’s doomed Welsh Streets. Now they have been called in to simulate a Balfron flat in “authentic” 1968 style. For an admission fee of £12, you can admire G-Plan tables and a floral sun-lounger, Ladderax shelving and a woven bucket chair, all stuffed into the psychedelic surroundings of op-art wallpaper and Heal’s fabrics. With period touches extending to crockery and table lamps, it looks like some supercharged Austin Powers film set.

The flat in question is No 130, where Goldfinger and his wife Ursula lived when the building first opened, holding champagne-fuelled soirees for the residents, floor-by-floor. It was in order, wrote Goldfinger, to “experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms, the amenities provided, the time it takes to obtain a lift, the amount of wind whirling around the tower and any problems which might arise from my designs so that I can correct them in the future.” The experiment lasted two months, before the architect and his wife retreated to their Hampstead nest on Willow Road (a property now also managed by the National Trust). Their stay was decried as a publicity stunt by the architectural profession – “Please come down, Ernö” was the headline printed in the Architects’ Journal – and it went on to provide the inspiration for JG Ballard’s High Rise, in which the pompous master architect lives at the top of his doomed creation, and comes to a sticky end.

But it was a pleasant sojourn for Ursula Goldfinger, and an eye-opening window on to popular taste. “Bar the complaints of draughts from some windows, heating that didn’t work, they all said the flats were lovely,” she wrote in her diary. “Those I have been into are beautifully kept, people are going to a lot of trouble to install them mostly with outrageously terrible furniture, carpets, curtains and ornaments, though I don’t think the designs of fabrics are much worse than those I see at the Design Centre.” At least the Hemingways, it seems, have been faithful to her observations.

Parodic decor aside, the two-week open flat provides an interesting glimpse into the Goldfinger dream, but there remains something deeply uncomfortable about feeding off the lost ambition of what the building once was. The Balfron’s younger brother, the Trellick Tower, across town in the much more affluent borough of Kensington, remains majority social rented, despite similar pressures. Only 36 of its 217 flats are in private hands, whereas the Balfron’s 146 flats will soon be entirely privately owned.

As Joseph Watson, programme manager at the National Trust, writes in the accompanying guide book, “Balfron Tower is the welfare state in concrete. It deserves, nay demands, our attention.” But it demands our attention precisely because it is now the zombie corpse of the welfare state, being spruced up and sold off like countless estates across London, eviscerated of its original social purpose. Now it’s become the fashionable icon of plates and cushions, brutalism is a style reserved for the few.