Barbican Living
A great place to live
“The aesthetic is rather that of the Sublime. It is apparent in the stunning height of the tower blocks seen from below and in the tremendous unbroken length of several lower blocks, no less than in the thrillingly vertiginous crossing of the lake on a gangway slung between the tall columns of the cross slab. From here one can overlook the rushing water of the cascades as if from a bridge across some mountain gorge."
"The Buildings of England", Nikolaus Pevsner and Simon Bradley
The Barbican is an estate of 2,013 flats and houses, built round a lake and gardens and the Barbican Arts Centre. It is part of the bustling City of London - we share our routes home with people going to concerts and plays at the Arts Centre.
The Barbican has all the factors which are meant to denote a desolate inner-city landscape – “brutal” concrete construction, enormous tower blocks, high windswept walkways. But I was struck, when wandering round one sunny Sunday morning, making notes for this website, how dramatic and beautiful it really is.
Certainly there is concrete, but it’s varied and beautiful. I’m fed up being told that only bricks are beautiful. To me, real overdose-inducing, depressing ugliness is a wet February afternoon walking round endless streets of identical Victorian terraced houses in Fulham. As for windswept, if the weather is windy, the Barbican is windy. So is Hyde Park.
At 42-storeys, the three tower blocks were the tallest residential buildings in Europe when they were built. From my flat overlooking Shakespeare Tower, I can see people coming out onto their terraces for a drink and a view across London to St Pauls and onwards. People love their flats in the tower blocks. They are not marooned, they are elevated.
The entrances to the terrace blocks are mainly at podium level. One of the acts of brilliance of the architects was to put car parks at street level and to build the estate above it. As a result, once you are in the Barbican, you are almost unaware of the traffic which passes underneath. Podium level is simply ground level to you. There are walkways between some buildings and right round the estate at this level. Elevated walkways don’t have a happy history in this country. It raises images of bad Council estates. But ours are certainly not like that. They are reassuring links between buildings. They are full of variety, with trees and views.
Wherever you stand there are interesting and unexpected lines and angles. Most dramatically, although we tend to be blasé about it, there is the tremendous suspended bridge across the lake, joining the Barbican Centre to London Wall. But everywhere there are juxtapositions between walkways and towers which are very pleasing to the eye.
It’s simply a great place to live.
