The Barbican Centre and Estate

Where does one begin with the Barbican? It is one of Britain’s international brutalist icons, globally renowned for its multi-functional ensemble serving slices of culture, education and leisure alongside private residence. Close to three decades from its inception to completion, it has matured to become a true inner-city neighbourhood replete with most of the utopian promises of the era from which it emerged. In 1951 there were 28 residents left in the parish of St Giles, when in 1851 they had numbered c.14,000. [1] The earliest comprehensive plans for the area, after 1945, were advanced in 1954 by the New Barbican Committee, a pressure group set up under the chairmanship of Sir Gerald Barry, a newspaper editor and organiser of the Festival of Britain. Amongst those contributing to the multi-layered, mixed-use proposals was Sergei Kadleigh, Russian born, British raised, graduate of the AA, private practitioner and eventually Reader in Architecture at the RCA. Kadleigh famously promoted the massive redevelopment of ‘High Paddington’ in 1952, similarly dense and with diverse functions as well as composed using hexagonal geometries seen in the Barbican proposal. It might be said that the seeds of an idea of vertically stacked multi-functional comprehensive development were sewn by this group. Chamberlin Powell and Bon’s first scheme was published in mid-1956, drawing on the precedent not of Kadleigh, but that of the Adam brothers’ Adelphi, an unprecedented attempt to create a large district of housing, elevated via novel engineering on a series of vaulted warehouses above the River Thames. (The Adelphi was recognised by Swiss architect-planner Hans Bernoulli for its vertical segregation of various forms of movement.) Within the first report were drawings by Gordon Cullen, including one showing a pyramidal botanic glass house – the pyramid form survived into the 1959 revised report, but not the detailed design and construction process – however, the Barbican does famously host a conservatory with over 1500 species of plants. The facts and figures of this microcosmic citadel are well recorded and need no restating here. More, its transformation to cultural icon, desirable residence and overall success is worthy of comment. London, as you probably know, is like another country, despite it being the capital of one. By this, I mean that its financial clout and sheer density make it operate according to its own set of rules, not those that govern built space elsewhere in the UK. Other monolithic megastructures, conceived in the heat of progress and swept up in consensual change, have had less fortune than the thriving urban oasis in the City – Cumbernauld is threatened with demolition as I write; Park Hill has been gutted, reskinned and repackaged; Hulme Crescents were lost only a decade after the Barbican was fully finished. Yet, the Barbican has weathered its short-lived out-of-fashion phase and settled into the consciousness of a public far beyond those bothered with urbanism as a centre for culture, for leisure, for pleasure and as something of a retreat. Although, on completion, the reviews were not universally appreciative. Writing in Art Monthly on the subject of the opening exhibition, Peter Fuller opined that, ‘The Barbican Centre is part of a Sixties fantasy that the arts ought to be consumed, an attitude which leads to a building which looks and feels like an endless department store restaurant.’ [2] Perhaps such a vision was prophetic…? It seems that capitalism has led us to a space where aught ought to be consumed, even the atmosphere of the Barbican and, if you are in any way inclined to be bothered by urbanism, its spaces are more than ripe for consumption – I say, ‘drink it in’.

[1] Report to the Court of Common Council of the Corporation of the City of London on residential development within the Barbican Area prepared on the instructions of the Special Committee by Chamberlin Powell and Bon Architects, May 1956.

[2] ‘The Barbican’s opening exhibition’, Art Monthly, April 1982, p.13.