An Explanation of Flat ‘Types’ in Frobisher Crescent


The Barbican Estate, including Frobisher Crescent, was built in the 1970s. Frobisher Crescent was meant to be a residential block like all the others, but for some reason the City decided at the last moment to use the premises instead as offices. In 2009-10 the City in conjunction with United House turned the top three floors of Frobisher Crescent into 69 apartments.

Frobisher Crescent is a curved building, and the curve is not uniform – it extends in width, and flattens out slightly, on the eastern side. So there was not much scope for flats to be tidily uniform in size and layout. Nonetheless, while there are many one-off flats, there are also quite a number of flats which share identical configurations.

The developers assigned ‘flat types’ to all the different flat layouts. Some – like 7.5 – simply equate to single flats, but others – like 7.2 – are layouts which apply to several flats.

Frobisher Crescent flat types are easy to distinguish from Original Barbican or Blake Tower flat types because they are always a number and a decimal number – e.g. 7.2, 8.5, or 9.10.

Type 8.3 (but no other type) has two versions which only differ slightly, and so are known as 8.3A and 8.3B.

The number before the decimal tells you which floor a flat type is on. So, 7.2 is on the 7th floor (the lowest residential floor), 8.5 is on the 8th floor (the middle residential floor) and – apologies for telling you the obvious – 9.10 is on the top floor.

The ‘7’s and the ‘8’s are not all that different from each other; they are all regular flats on one level.  Flats on the 7th and 8th floors with the same number after the decimal are usually quite similar. Type 7.2 and Type 8.2 are very similar, for example. The 8th floor version is usually slightly larger than the 7th floor version.

The ‘9’s are duplex flats with a ‘ground floor’ and a smaller upper floor, so they are rather different from the flats on the lower floors.