Barbican Living
Crime in the Barbican
[An article I wrote for Barbican Life magazine in 2006]
A few Saturdays ago I went down to buy my newspaper to find that Beech Street was cordoned off with police tape. I was standing at the Barbican entrance and one of the guys from Crispins, who was also watching the police activity, pointed out that I was standing in a pool of blood. It seemed that someone had been stabbed in Fabric and staggered all the way to the Barbican before finally collapsing. A pool of blood really is as red as it looks in the movies. Blue police tape seems to be a regular feature of weekends in our area. I can remember most of Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads being cordoned off around Christmas time after a shoot-out near Gaudi’s. In the Summer, they put up a plastic tent round the crime scene when someone was hit over the head with a lump of concrete and left for dead in Cowcross Street. Then there was the shooting at some music awards at the Barbican Centre last year when a woman in the street got caught in the cross-fire. Surely even downtown LA can’t be seeing as much action as Smithfield these days.
There seems to be a perception that the level of crime and violence has risen in the Barbican itself. Notice boards contain warnings about terrorism. Most doors have instructions stuck to them about not letting strangers in. I have personally been involved in several crimes in the Barbican over the years. My flat was burgled in 1995. They got away with my TV, stereo, and most of my CDs. It turned out to be an inside job and the culprits were caught. Later my bicycle was stolen from the car park. A drug addict tried to hit me over the head with a chair in the coffee bar next to the Barbican station when I stopped him stealing a bag. Fortuitously one of the staff, Carlos, is an ex-Portuguese paratrooper and he saved me. Then a member of the Serious Fraud Office tried to sell me evidence in the Holmes Place health club on the corner of Beech Street and I had to wear a wire-tap to meetings. His membership lapsed for a number years after that.
So, armed with a certainty that the Barbican is already all but submerged in a wave of crime and violence, I decided to do a bit of checking on how bad things really are. It turns out that in the two ‘wards’ which comprise the Barbican Estate – Aldersgate and Cripplegate – there were 31 crimes which took place on the Barbican Estate or which related to residents in the last year (to October). 14 of these were simple opportunistic thefts (not burglaries or robberies). There have been no drug arrests in the Barbican.
There were 5 sexual offences. 3 related to residents – victims or perpetrators, I don’t know. 2 were indecent assaults on the John Wesley High Walk near London Wall. The police have since put an increased police presence on the high walk, including some plain clothes officers.
There has been 1 burglary. That was on the Postern during a bank holiday. Apparently this is the first case of burglary on the Estate which the police have had to investigate in the last 3 years. The police have not caught the culprit. You may be used to the idea that in some areas the police barely bother to return your calls after a burglary. Here they even checked for DNA evidence, so they seem to take burglary as seriously as we do. There were 7 other burglaries in the area, but they were all in offices.
There were 4 cases of criminal damage in the Barbican Estate. Someone threw a bicycle saddle at the car park office in Andrewes House and broke the window. Elsewhere, a window frame was scratched. Rather more seriously, someone threw a bag of flour and tomato ketchup off a balcony in Lauderdale tower and damaged the bonnet of a taxi waiting In Lauderdale Place. The most serious case was that someone threw a shopping trolley down the stairwell in the centre of Lauderdale Tower. Fortunately, it was caught by wire mesh hanging above ground level, but it would have killed anyone it had hit. The police don’t know who did this. In my opinion it isn’t a stretch to assume there is someone a bit crazy or a yob living in Lauderdale Tower who doesn’t care about people’s safety and I would urge anyone with suspicions to pass them on to the police.
There has been one robbery (theft with violence) in the estate. The victim was one of the Barbican staff. He was in Lauderdale Terrace when a man held a corkscrew or a pen-knife to his neck and stole his mobile phone. He was obviously badly shaken, but he was not injured. There have been 4 cases which the police categorise as ‘violent crimes’ but they were all verbal harassments, and relatively low key, not serious assaults. There was one homophobic incident where youths shouted at someone in the terrace area.
Despite the impression that we are surrounded by drunken ravening hordes some evenings, in fact there were only 5 incidents of people being drunk and disorderly in the last year, and they all involved people having a drink locally who didn’t live nearby. Either Barbican residents never get drunk or else they hold it well.
All in all, the reality seems to be that we live in a remarkably safe area, with low levels of crime, with most of that crime occurring on the periphery of the estate.
There may be a number of reasons why the Barbican Estate is relatively crime-free. Ironically one of the major factors according to the City police is the one feature of the estate that everyone bores on about – the fact that no-one can find their way in or out. According to the police that works to our benefit. Criminals don’t want to risk finding themselves trapped in an area with no obvious way out when they have committed a crime.
The other major factor must be the policing in the Barbican area. We are fortunate to come within the City of London police area. The City of London police covers the City, including the Barbican, and extends into Smithfield. Charterhouse Street is the boundary with the Metropolitan Police area, so a crime inside Fabric is handled by Scotland Yard, but a crime on the pavement in front is handled by the City of London police.
I have fond memories of the City of London police force. They sent me to a meeting once with £100,000 in a brief case, except that they discovered at the last minute that they hadn’t got all the money, so I ended up with a case full of the traditional wads of guillotined newspaper sandwiched between £20 notes. It turned out that one team was investigating the man I was paying the money to, and another team was investigating me for paying the money, and both teams met in the lift on the way to the stake-out. Then they hadn’t booked the right hotel room for the meeting, so when they were meant to rush in to save me, when they heard my assailant pull a gun on me, the plastic key didn’t work, and they had to kick the door frame in. Fortunately he’d only picked up the phone.
PC Dave Whitbread is the ward constable for the Barbican Estate. He has worked in the City for 19 years, the last 3 in the Barbican. His office – the Community Beat Office - is the old Central Services office at the base of Shakespeare Tower. How many other areas can you think of where residential estates have their own dedicated police offices and police officers? This is one of the unique benefits of living within the City of London Police area. God help us if the City of London Police Force ever gets absorbed into the Met. Dave Whitbread also has 6 PCSOs or Police Community Support Officers who are based here, and cover the whole Snow Hill area. They are not actually policemen and do not have power of arrest (beyond what we all have as citizens), although they can issue tickets for things like dog fouling, or cycling on the foot path. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but they look like regular policemen, and they are out and about providing high visibility and therefore deterrent value for us.
Residents and their representatives also have a say in the policing of the estate. There are regular meetings of a Barbican Residents Security Committee, which is a sub-committee of the Barbican Residential Committee. This is combined with quarterly ward meetings of the Aldersgate, Cripplegate and Coleman Street wards, which cover the Barbican as a whole.
A lot of what PC Whitbread does is not police work as we would normally understand it. He says he often acts more like an arbiter or mediator in disputes which occur on the estate. For instance, there has been a long-running argument about parking on St Giles’ forecourt. Some residents have objected to the number of cars the church has allowed to be parked there. He has been involved in trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement of that dispute.
Another issue he is often called in to deal with is noise. This usually comes from licensed premises, but there are occasional noisy parties in flats, which disturb the neighbours. Dave Whitbread says it is usually people who have taken a letting of a flat who cause these kinds of problems but after a quiet word the problem normally stops.
There have been sporadic problems with youths on the estate. In the past, this has mainly involved skate boarders. But they are disappearing now that the estate office has made the estate less attractive for skateboarding by putting knobs on rails on the St Alphage Highwalk and elsewhere. There was a spate of graffiti in the past but they arrested 2 boys the year before last, and this put paid to a lot of it. There are a couple of homeless men who are sometimes seen around the estate or nearby. Dave Whitbread says they are well known to the police and do not pose any kind of threat. The City police are working with St Mungo’s, a housing charity, to get them re-housed.
The weakest point in the Barbican from a security point of view is apparently the pair of hip-high gates at either end of Brandon Mews. On the face of it, anyone could just hop over them and get straight into Speed Garden. But surprisingly neither kids nor criminals seem to do this. When it does happen, it is usually in the summer, and usually involves children the police know about.
When I asked Dave Whitbread whether he thought crime was on the increase in the estate he pointed out that in the early years of the estate there had been a sergeant and 8 constables working round the clock in shifts in the old office in Willoughby House. There was a lot more crime in those days. The City police view is that the reduction is evidence of the stabilization of the community in the Barbican – in other words the community is a lot more close-knit and law-abiding.
One ‘crime’ which is on the increase is domestic violence. The offence itself may not necessarily be on the increase, it may just be that people are more prepared to report it, but there have been a few incidents relating to residents in the last year. Dave Whitbread emphasised to me that he is available to help anyone who is suffering domestic violence.
Dave Whitbread is clearly enthusiastic about his job and wants residents to feel he is part of the Barbican community. He hopes we will regard him as our ‘village bobby’ and that kids on the estate will grow up knowing him. His door is always open, he says, and if he is not in the office itself he can be contacted by phone (7601 2906 or 07921 095346) and by e-mail (david.whitbread@city-of-london.pnn.police.uk) when he is on duty. Out of hours, there is an external phone – a yellow box – just outside the office door which will connect you to Snow Hill police station. If you want immediate help in relation to a crime, then depending on the urgency, you should ring Snow Hill police station (7601 2406) or dial ‘999’.
The community beat office in the Barbican is more for what Dave Whitbread calls ‘after sales care’, and for general advice and help. Dave Whitbread can help you with security issues on your flat. He will be happy to come around and see you. Or he can arrange for one of the specialists from the Crime Reduction Office to advise you on security measures.
But there is really no particular cause for us to feel an increased threat in our homes. One important precaution is only to let people into our buildings if we know them, or they show a key, and not just because they are carrying pizza boxes. But still, there have actually been no burglaries or attacks by people getting in when a door is opened by someone else - ‘tailgaters’ as the police call them. (The burglary in the Postern was by a ‘climber’ not a ‘tailgater’.)
Unpleasant things may happen in clubs in Smithfield, and as Christmas approaches we will be dodging more and more drunken office workers, but in our estate it seems we should continue to be as safe and secure as we have always been.
