Barbican Living
Description of Ben Jonson House
Ben Jonson House (completed in March 1973) is the longest terrace block in the Barbican. It runs east to west on the north podium. At the front, it faces south towards the Arts Centre. At the back, it looks down on Finsbury and a local school playground.
There are seven residential floors above podium level, including two and three storey penthouse flats. There are no flats below podium level. The house contains 204 flats (numbered 201 - 268, 301 - 368, and 501 - 568).
In many other blocks, there is a central corridor running along each floor like a spine. As a result, flats can only be quite shallow (from the corridor to the front or to the back of the building). But in Ben Jonson House as in Bunyan Court on a smaller scale, they solved the problem by not having a corridor on every floor. Instead, there is an entrance floor for each row of flats - the second, third and fifth floors - which does have a central corridor. This allows the building to be populated with two-storey maisonettes with internal stairs to the non-corridored floor, where they can then take up the whole depth of the floor from front to back.
Ben Jonson House has entrance blocks at either end and in the middle. Some India fakirs have left their beds of nails in the entrances in place of carpet. Nearly all the corridors have been re-carpeted but in some places there are annoying access panels cut right in the middle of the carpets, rather like temporary road works.
The part of the podium around Ben Jonson House is called Ben Jonson Place. At the front, it has its own mini gardens. Some are raised about a foot above podium level with tiling up the side all round (much beloved by skateboarders apparently). Some are in large brick walled rectangles. There are a mixture of wooden benches and brick seats so you can enjoy the flowers. There are also some neglected coffin-like concrete boxes along the edge of the parapet wall which seem to have been left as an after-thought. There are similar gardens at the back overlooking a local playground.
