The Barbican

Selected by

Robert Elms, Writer and broadcaster

For nearly 40 years Elms has been one of the most distinctive faces and voices in the British media. A journalist, author and presenter, his multi award winning daily radio show on BBC London, covering all aspects of life in the metropolis, including his passion for great music, is the most listened to programme on British local radio. Born in the city in the sunny summer of 1959, educated at Orange Hill Grammar school and Queens Park Rangers football club, Elms progressed to the LSE and numerous night-clubs where he studied dressing up and falling over. A combination of these two led inexorably to a career as a writer. The start of the 1980's also saw the start of The Face, the pioneering style bible, where Elms instantly found a niche for his diatribes on the intricacies of young urban life and becoming editor of The Face in his early 20’s. He began broadcasting for the BBC, most notably as part of the team of Loose Ends on radio 4 where he won his first Sony. In 1986 he combined two ambitions by going to live in Spain to write his debut novel. In Search Of The Crack was a Penguin original when he was just 27. He also began travel writing for The Sunday Times, Elms continued his obsession with Iberia by writing his second book Spain - A Portrait After The General which was nominated as travel book of the year in 1992.
Location

Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
Architecture

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon 1982 Grade II listed
The Barbican, one of Britain’s finest examples of Brutalist architecture, was developed from designs by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as part of a utopian vision to transform an area of London left devastated by bombing during the Second World War.

‘Barbican’ used to be the name of a street in a bustling commercial area in the ward of Cripplegate. By the end of the 19th century it was the centre of the rag trade and was home to fabric and leather merchants, furriers, glovers and a host of other tradesmen.

On 29 December 1940 the City of London came under the fire of the German bombers and the area around Barbican was flattened as fire swiftly spread across the warehouses. By the end of the war, only a few buildings still stood, including the damaged Church of St Giles’ Cripplegate.

After the Second World War, the Corporation of the City of London, the governing body of the City, sought to rebuild the commercial area which had been almost completely razed to the ground during the Blitz. Recognising the need for comprehensive planning after the war, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 enabled local authorities, such as the Corporation, to buy land in order to redevelop large areas.

The Centre took over a decade to build and was opened by The Queen in 1982, who declared it ‘one of the modern wonders of the world’ with the building seen as a landmark in terms of its scale, cohesion and ambition. Its stunning spaces and unique location at the heart of the Barbican Estate have made it an internationally recognised venue, set within an urban landscape acknowledged as one of the most significant architectural achievements of the 20th century.

The Arts Centre was the last phase to be completed, giving the Barbican a public dimension and including an art gallery, library, concert hall, theatres and cinemas.
Interesting facts

Photographer Peter Bloomfield was commissioned by the Barbican to document the final stages of the building’s construction, and offer a fascinating insight in to the scale of the work.

https://sites.barbican.org.uk/buildingthebrutal/
Resources

https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/our-archive/construction

The residential towers of the Barbican, Lauderdale, Cromwell and Shakespeare.

...I call it home and feel honoured to do so, because this is the best example of 20th Century architecture in all London.

Sculpture Court at the Barbican ©Max Colson

It’s the monumental scale and scope of the Barbican estate, which blows you away, an epic and optimistic urban intervention, which reshaped The City and redefined the way we live. Either that or it’s the wind, which whips around the towers and through the unknowable labyrinth of walkways. At least I thought it was unknowable, a baffling brutalist maze until I moved there and slowly mastered its secrets and discovered its delights. Now I not only know it, but I call it home and feel honoured to do so, because this is the best example of 20th Century architecture in all London.

Lakeside Terrace at the Barbican ©Max Colson

The audacity of turning a vast bombsite into a Utopian experiment in communal living with the most exacting and rigorous architectural purity is still something we should salute the City of London Corporation for doing back in the forward looking 1960’s. I doubt that such a gargantuan and controversial scheme would get the green light now. And only now, fifty years later can we really appreciate what a spectacular job they did. It gets better and better as we get used to it.

With cinemas and theatres, a library and a conservatory private gardens and public squares, lakes and promenades, it is a town within the city, an oasis of order amid the architectural cacophony all around. There are more than two thousand apartments, in a huge range of configurations, but all with a uniform aesthetic, wonderful light and views and exemplary detailing.

We chose to be as high as possible in one of the three iconic towers, those jagged giants, which puncture the skyline so dramatically. Partly because of the spectacular views they afford, but also because they represent the Barbican at it most uncompromising and unapologetic. This is high-rise, high-density urban living at its most extreme. It is civilised and cultured, beautiful if brutal and still feels thoroughly modern fifty years later.

...I call it home and feel honoured to do so, because this is the best example of 20th Century architecture in all London.

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