I'd love to retire there when the kids are gone, although there are a lot of oddities about Barbican living to contend with that are probably more fun to read about than deal with for real.
Did you used to cook for the seven dwarves and their extended families, every day?
This is quite common for older places in the UK. Some places might have been updated to allow for a dishwasher, but there are probably rules against that in the Barbican.
This is just London, out of the 8 years I've spent here, 3 of them were spent with a dishwasher. Tbh I've got a dishwasher now and barely use it.
30 minutes? Either you're cleaning up a sink full of dishes you neglected for a week or cleaning up after cooking a dinner for four or more. If you immediately clean your dishes after use its takes almost no time at all, maybe a minute or two.
Withnail: Have you got soup? Why don't I get any soup?
Marwood: Coffee.
Withnail: Why don't you use a cup like any other human being?
Marwood: Why don't you wash up occasionally like any other human being?
Withnail: (Appalled) How dare you! How dare you! How dare you call me inhumane?!
Thanks for that, put a smile on my face.
And about 200ft. Such is the maze-like nature of the Barbican.
If we're going to fill out the roster, let's say Radio 1 is Camden, 1xtra is Brixton, Radio 2 is Bromley, Radio 5 is Dagenham, and 6music is eh.. I dunno, Shoreditch?
It's not so bad once you head out into the counties either I suppose.
Years ago I bought a flat and it came with an underground parking garage. Once we were settled in I break the garage lock and inside was an old Peugot, cans of old motor oil, and all sorts of junk shoved in between the garage door cracks. It was hell to get rid of the thing. The tires were flat. No title meant no tow trucks wanted to touch it and no scrap yard was willing to accept it. After too many months I was able to get the city to declare the car derelict. And then I had to pay a scrap yard to accept it.
While it doesn't stop cars from being abandoned "randomly", just the entire principle of having a paper trail for these things and creating a bunch of incentives to make sure that parking spots don't turn into trash heaps[0].
Especially now that I live in a place where street parking is a prime resource and yet people _who have garages_ still choose to street park out of convenience...
[0]: not always of course, I know about the trash houses
The flat was built and purchased in the 60s, abandoned in the 90s, and sold to us in 2010s. It was near a newly gentrifying, former industrial area. I think we went back and forth with the city for 10 months before they agreed to give me the paperwork that would allow it to be scrapped. I get that no one wants to get it wrong and accidentally throw someone else's property into the bin.
I bet someone would have been absolutely delighted to have that old Peugeot!
Also, we already have a car. Why would I want someone else's scraps?
I’m assuming there contents of the garage became your property, and thus legal liability, when you purchased the flat?
Since the property is derelict and you weren’t aware of it previously, and the disposal of the property caused undue effort and cost, would the failure to disclose the contents of the garage by the former owner and/or their agent constitute some kind of breach of duty or some other kind of contract violation?
Anyhow, one day I went a different way and there was this massive, tropical greenhouse. Kinda hard to believe if you've ever seen the place.
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/visit-the-co...
Such a contrast to the Sky Garden in the City which has all the charm of an airport departure lounge.
Until last lear, The Lead Developer conference (https://leaddev.com/) was held there, but it's moved to a larger venue for this year (I don't think the size of the main hall was the problem, it was the areas for break out etc.) They had a great talk about the history of the place: https://leaddev.com/leadership/you-are-here-the-story-of-the...
The Barbican Theatre is one of the London homes of the Royal Shakespeare Company, although they are looking to
Unrelated, but recently the complex has been appearing in the general consciousness again as the excellent Apple TV series/spy novels Slow Horses (about a bunch of outcast MI5 agents) is set near there.
(That same Live at the Barbican album is weirdly hard to find because it was a damned Apple Music exclusive. Travesty...)
I'm not sure there is a really, really great concert hall from an acoustics perspective in London. Back in Manchester I loved the Bridgewater because it was designed to be acoustically good no matter how many people were in the audience. I can't think of anything that modern and carefully thought through, so I tend to look for smaller venues with more "classical" approaches to acoustics (Wigmore, St Martins, and so on). Where do you like?
I lived there for the better part of a year and it completely changed my perspective on living in London. More city-life should be like the Barbican.
I read somewhere, I wish I could remember where, that some urban designers in the 60s had the feeling that people should spend their recreation time in their private homes rather than outside.
The Barbican felt like it had achieved that ideal of lifelessness, with bizarrely large and featureless open spaces, scant seating, etc. Of course that contrasted with the spaces around the arts centre which were bustling.
I lived for a while on Bedford Avenue between the British Museum and TCR and it was dead quiet, despite the location.
Few others worth exploring...
Walden 7 (Spain): A labyrinthine, colorful complex by Ricardo Bofill with inner courtyards and skybridges, aiming for a more social urban life based on B.F. Skinner's Walden Two philosophy.
Arcosanti (USA): Paolo Soleri’s desert experiment in “arcology”, architecture + ecology—exploring sustainable living in a compact footprint.
Unité d'Habitation (France): Le Corbusier’s "vertical garden city" combining apartments, shops, and communal spaces into one concrete megastructure.
Habitat 67 (Canada): Modular housing units stacked like Lego, Moshe Safdie’s vision for dense yet humane urban living.
Auroville (India): Founded in the 1960s as an experimental township aiming for human unity beyond politics and religion.
In the cases of the buildings, over time their value has increased faster than an average dwelling in the vicinity, making them more exclusive and restricting access to those higher and higher up the socio-economic ladder - effectively turning them into gated community without the residents needing to feel the guilt of living behind physical gates.
The buildings are still there, and they have inhabitants, but the investment potential has long outlived any philosophy. I guess you could argue there are some secondary effects from their influence, but I wonder how the architects would feel today.
See also Park Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hill%2C_Sheffield
The barbican was created as a council proyect for middle class people. Nowadays council houses are considered only for destitute families. So of course the priorities, prices, and accesibility of thsoe houses is very limited compared to what you could do with a proyect like the barbican.
I think with inflation on mind the average salary would be like 70k, which is way above UK average, but certainly very accesible to a large number of working professionals in the UK. There simply is not something half as good for that money being built nowadays in the UK. So obvs Barbican increases in price when there is no analagous purchase possible.
However, I feel like HDB should declare victory and go home.
They're mostly too expensive because they're rare
https://themodernhouse.com/sales-list/thomas-more-house-ii
https://themodernhouse.com/sales-list/Lauderdale-Tower-II
https://themodernhouse.com/sales-list/willoughby-house
https://themodernhouse.com/sales-list/ben-jonson-house-iii
And all are sold on that weird UK feudal relic, leaseholds, so you're just buying for a certain number of years - a couple of the ones above only have ~80 years remaining.
The shoddy windows are particularly easy to spot, even in the pictures in the article. I'm not even sure these would be legal in Germany.
If they lowered the service charges tomorrow, that would just mean that the headline market price of the apartments would go up to compensate.
If they moved from leasehold to freehold tomorrow, you would also see that reflected in the price.
The thing about Barbican is that it is an opinionated living complex. People who built it had an idea on how the urban living is supposed to be and sculptured that in concrete. Very few things are changeable there, that's why it also feels like a different time.
I enjoyed walking from my office to the tube and get amazed by this giant place everyday. Never seized to amaze me. I would occasionally go there and work at the public places, it was often empty enough to find corners or passages where I can just observer the life happening in distance.
Here's a couple of photos: https://dropover.cloud/09cb4c
Whether its the Barbican, or "Grad Center" at Brown University, there are all sorts of elevated walkways that you can see from other levels, defying "every floor is like every other floor" expectations.
I think I have vague memories of when being a small child, being filled with wonder at various municipal buildings that did this. Though my memory hazy and I cannot remember the specific buildings.
Interbuilding passageways complicate future renovation and redevelopment, and spreading eyes on the street thinly makes all walking areas harder to secure.
They are also incredibly inconvenient. London had many walkways because they wanted to give cars priority, and they largely became unused and became a source for litter.
I was reading this post and thinking, huh, this would be a good set for a Coruscant shot in Andor, and sure enough ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Arts_and_Sciences
In particular, the Museo de las Ciencias Príncipe Felipe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Arts_and_Sciences#/med...
In comparison, in the barbican I felt like I could sit there for hours and enjoy the architecture. It has so many interesting details and aesthetically pleasing corners.
which is good too, it's a mix of Black comedy and spy tension.
I have a similar sort of fascination with a structure closer to me: Habitat 67 in Montreal. I have at various points considered buying a unit there but practicality prevents me from doing so each time. I don't know how long I'll resist.
https://www.architectural-review.com/today/the-interlace-in-...
I really miss more bold architectural and city planning experiments. Like, I get it, if it’s a flop, it’s a pretty expensive one. But still, it feels like the design-space there is just really under-explored.
Maybe there’s some AI-driven simulation way to explore the design-space and arrive at viable solutions before committing too much funds.
One can dream.
But more importantly for me, my usual life is not in Montreal. I love Montreal but moving there would require quite a few sacrifices in personal relationships that I don't feel like making. And government services in Quebec are also worse than in Ontario (where I am now).
https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/5w9ep7/cross_...
The old Robin Hood Gardens before they were demolished were quite unwelcoming, looking from the outside. You wouldn’t go anywhere near those kind of estates unless you were a resident, and you’d have a very different impression as someone who saw what it was like internally.
But it’s still dreary, in person, on a cloudy day. This style looks good in drawings, well lit and edited photos, but I think it’s a false/failed direction in living reality (specifically the facade, the building shape, “tunnels” etc).
It's awful if you're walking along actual roads though. I would avoid it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
> In the United Kingdom, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world, while being echoed by similar styles like in Eastern Europe
So beware the vocal minority of English socialists that have a politically-tainted take on this architecture.
The rest of us agree with you. It's offensively ugly!
It's ironic the style is so strongly associated with socialism I think because it's much more 'dark Satanic mills' than 'England's green and pleasant land'.
I think the heavy maze like structure was incredibly effective at blocking out the sound of the city and the water features / conservatory made it an amazing place to chill out for a relaxing lunch.
Not quite cyberpunk, not quite solarpunk but somewhere in between and utterly unique.
Elsewhere in the place, I have loved going to exhibitions, theatre plays, gigs and the cinema. It's a one-stop cultural hub that evokes the glamour of flying in the olden days.
He would rave about the place but I’m not a fan of it personally.
Aesthetically it’s out of place and (in my personal opinion) a bit of an eye sore.
The maze like design seems fun at first but it’s less amusing if you’re the one who’s actually lost in there and have somewhere to be.
The apartments are small and impossible to get the temperature right (too hot in summer, too cold in winter).
But because its iconic people still pay an obscene amount to live there.
The on-site amenities are pretty good, but its central London, you’re not far from literally anything you could imagine or desire. So I’m not sure that’s as much a selling point now than it was when the estate was built.
It’s one of those places you’d have to really love in spite of its warts because it’s so impractical by modern standards.
This is totally inaccurate. It's the business district. If not for the Barbican, the nearest serious art gallery, repertory cinema, music auditorium, are all around half an hour away.
But even half an hour isn’t a long walk. ;)
Me and my 10 year old kid were playing quake 1 together, a map pack called Brutalism jam. Having discussed the style we went to barbican, saw the greenhouse and walked around the complex for a while.
The kid couldn't stop talking about it for months! Amazing place (also a surreal map pack).
A Brutalist building with zero plants looks like a totalitarian prison hellscape designed to destroy your soul before it destroys your body.
A Brutalist building surrounded by trees with every nook containing greenery and vines dangling down looks like some kind of idyllic Star Wars planet populated by fuzzy hobbit-like creatures.
I'm not sure why I find this effect so strong. Perhaps because flat gray concrete is aesthetically ambiguous. When paired with greenery, it looks like stone. In it's absence, it looks like industrial mechanism.
> Perhaps because flat gray concrete is aesthetically ambiguous. When paired with greenery, it looks like stone. In it's absence, it looks like industrial mechanism.
Yes, this is the fundamental error of modernism/brutalism - the belief that flatness and the lack of ornamentation is beautiful. It can be .. but only under optimal conditions, like the concept art. "Material design" for buildings. As soon as it gets a bit weathered and dirty it becomes merely drab. Plants provide some organic variation over the surface, breaking up the now-dirty "clean" lines.
Fun fact: a good chunk of the video to “As It Was” was shot there.
1) Orlando Bloom did the drama course when we were there. Famous music students there include Bryn Terfel, Jaqueline du pre and tons of others.
2) I say we because my wife did a music postgrad there at the same time but we didn’t meet until we left even though we were once on the same openday concert program together. (My composition was chosen to represent the jazz courses so I was in a group that played that - my wife won a chamber music award so she was playing later in the concert with a guitarist, but us jazzers didn’t get to see that).
3) We didn’t meet because she did early music whereas I did the jazz course and all the lessons on the jazz course were underground. You may think I am joking but literally all our lessons were in the basement except for if we had a visiting musician do a masterclass (then they used to use one of the nice airy and bright above-ground rooms, some of which have a lovely view of the lake).
4) As well as the concert hall which people have mentioned, there is a theatre and at least 2 cinemas as part of the Barbican complex. If you know where to look there are parts of the old roman wall and at least 2 ruined medieval churches. You are also not far at all from one of London’s real hidden gems, the cathedral of St Bartholomew the great, a medieval cathedral down a little side alley near Smithfield market that tons of people in London don’t even know exists. Oh and for Americans, Benjamin Franklin once worked there as a typesetter[1]
My wife now teaches at the Guildhall. It’s a pretty special place especially this time of year when it’s nice. You can go sit out by the lake in the sunshine, watch the ducks etc. It’s really peaceful even though you are yards from old street, moorgate, liverpool street etc some of the busiest parts of london.
Of all the great information, that's the bit that sticks in my mind for some reason. I'd like to pics of that...
For those interested / invested, they recently launched a Barbican renewal project: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/barbican-un...
The barbican is odd, mainly because its the only brutalist "council housing estate" that actually mostly worked as intended[1]
If you compare the layout/style to say the haygate estate (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13092349 where attack the block was filmed) or the lesser known aylesbury estate, its more enclosed, but no less brutalist.
What is different is that unlike the southwark estates, it always had the original tenancy requirements upheld (either by tenant action, location or happenstance.) [2]
This meant that it didn't have the massive abandonment in the 90s, left to rot throughout the 00s. The quality of the haygate estate was actually pretty high, secure entry, gardens for the low rise, district heating, trees and playgrounds.
What was fucked up was that the heygate was a dumping ground for undesirables. this mean a spiral of drugs, crime and antisocial behaviour. The barbican escaped most of this because people were too fucking posh.
The social life of the barbican was upheld because of the huge amounts of money poured into the cultural centres that are hidden (and I mean hidden, the place is a fucking impossible maze) Most of the tenant social clubs were disbanded on the other estates, and the halls sold off or leased out to businesses.
In many way, the barbican isn't a great estate in terms of building quality. Its the same as any >60s council property. They all had to be big enough, have a separate kitchen and decent storage.
[1] well its not a mixed class housing estate, its all full of posh design types, and a handful of tenants left over from the 80s
[2] to get a council house, you had to be of good standing, and have a job. It wasn't a place to dumo drugadicts or problem families.
TLDR: the barbican is decent housing because it was reasonably well maintained, and wasn't filled with families in distress, or habitual criminals. We need to build more council estates to the same standard, with the same rules as the 60s.
Much more thought gone into the aesthetics of the Barbican than the Heygate Estate though, which is why the Heygate Estate was the one that ended up as every film scout's first choice of "scary, deprived place" even though it reportedly actually wasn't bad by the standards of south London postwar estates. And that's before taking into account the Barbican's arts facilities and all the money spent maintaining its communcal areas
These photos look great, but I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly why.
The Barbican certainly looks better here than from what I remember of seeing it through the naked eye.
Notice how the shadows are somewhat teal-tinged and the contrast is toned down. There may or may not be some grain or vignetting added in post as well. There are Lightroom color profiles that can get this sort of color feel on application. But the compositions and natural lighting are pure photographer skill to chase.
Photography is a deeper, more subtle art than a lot of people realize. Two people can take a picture in the exact same location and time and get wildly different results.
IIUC it's the half circle at the top and the rectangular building at the bottom with a green park between them.
This site also seems to have lots of background info and details on various aspects of the buildings, though I haven't explored in depth --- https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk
Another fun Barbican fact is their Garchey System for waste disposal.
The wet food waste is collected communally and taken away by custom-built tanker vehicles that connect to the holding tanks. https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/barbican-now/garchey/the-ga...
I've never shot Leica. Is this color grading something you can pull straight out of the camera, or is this applied in post?
(Also wow that is expensive kit.)
To your question, the RAW's, unprocessed files are not like this from a Leica. You need to color grade (photographers say "post processing"). Color grading is used mostly for Video. In Photography, there are a lot of other things, it's mostly about light, not color. Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, Blacks/Whites etc.. Of course colors are also very important.
If you want good colors straight out of the camera, you could look into FujiFilm.
This is why I was asking. I've never shot Leica so was curious if Leica worked like Fuji and offered interesting color profiles in body.
> Leica's are expensive I agree. It was a dream of mine to use it though for almost two decades. I finally was in a position to get it three years ago.
Yeah sorry I don't mean to throw shade with that comment. Your compositions are great and interesting and your moments seem deliberate. Artistry went into this, these are good photos :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trellick_Tower
https://architectureau.com/articles/the-brutality-of-vertica...
- how much design work was put into it. So many of it, from little bits and bobs (an awning, an electric socket, a doorframe), to the overall layout are unique to the area they are in and aren't copy-pasted elsewhere! It creates a coherent, but varying ensamble that is vibrant and alive, and is not just a grid of repeated elements.
- relatedly, how deeply organic the maze of the Barbican is. Contrast the raw concrete of the Barbican with the flowing lines of the Walkie-Talkie: one has an organic and smooth shape, but is really a 3D grid of repeated blocks; the other is made entirely of exposed raw concrete, but you never know what you will see around a corner. In this sense, the Barbican is more organic than most modern architecture. It's a place of wonder and surprise.
I love the Barbican.
It was also the setting for part of Harry Styles As It Was https://youtu.be/H5v3kku4y6Q
I personally love the brutalist and gigantic architecture of this time. Jam pack the flats, leave space for nature and public areas around it. Fairly standard in developed Asia, rare outside of ghettos in the West. Every time I discuss it with others, it's a hard sell against the "bbq with your neighbors in your back garden" so many aspire to by moving in suburbian houses.
The appearance of various Barbican adjacent locations in Slow Horses was a nice touch. And very on-point given the nature of Slough House.
Do they still have the rubber foot pedals to make the water come out of the taps in the public loos? Of course, being the Barbican the loos smell appalling and the taps frequently don't work, but it's all part of the charm.
There used to be an iconic club Fabric it was called. Nearby Farringdon is my favourite place in London. Most underrated area.
Theatre, concert hall, library, cinema and a few other things in the building. well kept gardens. Friendly and peaceful.
It's an interesting place to be sure, but I wouldn't praise it nearly as much as the article does.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43966676 expresses some of what I felt.
https://themodernhouse.com/sales-list/defoe-house-II
Edit: Just saw there's another comment with some other listings from that website, they are all quite nice.
https://www.nadamaktari.com/nadamaktari-memorylog/architectu...
The Barbican is Coruscant.
Never got up high enough to see the greenhouse.
There's a lot less of that feeling out in the world of 2025 but you can still find it if you look.
(English is my second language, so stuff like this can happen sometimes)
I was fortunate enough to be in there recently.
Walking around this imposing concrete structure, you feel its soullessness and brutalism. They made attempts to introduce greenery (like the temperate greenhouse area), but in the 21st century those areas are tired, poorly maintained and generally devoid of any visitors. The glass is misty or greening. The water features are stagnant. The concrete has aged poorly, with cracking and visible degradation.
London is full of beautiful Victorian and Georgian architecture, so brutalist concrete buildings look cringeworthy by comparison.. but they do seem to tickle the fancy of the socialist intelligentia, who love to proclaim how clever it all is - clever in a way that the common non-socialist folk simply wouldn't understand.
...left unsurprised.
