Barbican Living
Description of Defoe House
Defoe House (completed in December 1973) is a terrace block running east to west and positioned roughly between Lauderdale Tower and the Barbican Arts Centre. Defoe House forms the northern side of Thomas More garden.
As you walk home along the podium terrace beneath Defoe House, traffic noise disappears and what you see is the tree-lined Thomas More garden on your right and the lake ahead of you. Your spirits cannot help but rise. The podium is at its narrowest along the front of Defoe House. The columns supporting the building are so close to the parapet wall overlooking the garden, that if you meet someone coming in the other direction, one of you has to politely divert round the column. You really feel they should have moved Defoe House back a yard or two. After all, migrating herds of caribou could get lost in Defoe Place at the back.
But perhaps it is an advantage, because the garden parapet is the route for flat owners, while the crowds going to the Barbican Arts Centre are diverted onto the vast plains of Defoe Place. Defoe Place has no gardens built into it, unlike the north podium, but it has many log cabin-type plant containers with bushes and flowers to give some variety to the view.
There are 4 very similar terrace blocks: Andrewes House and Speed House which face each other over the lake; and Thomas More House and Defoe House, which face each other over Thomas More Gardens. Each block runs from east to west and their flats generally go the whole depth of the block from the front to the back (so residents look out of their windows north and south). Since each flat takes up the depth of the building, there is no central corridor. Instead, there are separate stairwells (with lifts, of course) at regular intervals along the block, and each stairwell has two flats on each floor. It's just like a series of terraced houses, each converted into flats. They each have penthouse flats at the top, 'garden' flats below the Podium level, and 6 floors of flats in between.
In Defoe House there are 178 flats and maisonettes (numbered 1 - 178) of which 24 are roof-top penthouses. Living rooms have a view of the garden or the lake and bedrooms look out over the garden square between John Trundle Court and Bryer Court at one end or Shakespeare Tower at the other. Most of the flats are Type 20 or Type 21 (with Type 19 flats at the end and a pair of Type 57 and Type 58 flats in the middle). On the top floor, the penthouses are Type 23 (with a couple of Type 60 and Type 61 flats). This is virtually the same layout as in the other three similar blocks.
There are some flats below podium level which have a view over Thomas More Garden. Unlike most of the other houses, the garden flats do not form part of the entrance and lift system. Access to the garden flats from the podium is by separate entrances down between the pillars.
