Barbican Estate

I love it around here. Its a great place to take a walk and admire the interesting building style. You also get to pretend to be on a space station in an old movie and that’s always fun.

It’s like a hidden post-​modern maze hidden in the centre of the city.
You can wander around it for hours finding it’s quirky little hidden bits, like the artistic tree trunk and the abandoned bank.
The best bit is its quiet, as for whatever reason, unless the sun is shining brightly, its empty. Leaving you alone to imagine your part of a seventies sci-​fi movie (or maybe thats just me).
It’s big, it’s brutalist and I like it

A real quirky oasis, I come here most lunchtimes as it’s a short walk from the City and yet so different, a haven dedicated to the arts and culture — highlights for me are the artificial lake and waterfall — it’s like one giant beautiful oxymoron.

Moonrising has said most of it: the Barbican is a remarkable example of a large post-​War housing project that has worked well, largely because of the quality of the design and the attention to detail: the various private gardens, extensive area of public patio and the wonderful expanses of water all make it distinctive. It has also been maintained to a very high standard — which marks it out from other, less successful estates.
It was built by the Corporation of London between 1965 and 1976 in an attempt to retain a viable population in the City of London, following extensive bomb damage in World War II. It now houses some 4,000 people, about half of the City’s population. As well as the Barbican Centre, it includes the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a section of the old London city wall — including the only bastion to survive, built in the 13^th century — and the mediaeval church of St Giles, Cripplegate.
I have several friends who live here, and the key features of the flats are the light and spacious design, flexible open-​plan layouts and the generous balconies. The layout is confusing to first time visitors, although there are now excellent maps at strategic locations to help you around.
Its three towers — 123m (over 400ft) high — are currently the tallest residential buildings in London, although they are to be superseded by a new development in London’s Docklands.

Most people have heard of the Barbican Centre, but you might not realise it’s part of a larger housing development with 2,018 flats, built over a large area of land where most of the old building were destroyed in the blitz. The Barbican as a whole is a remarkable example of modern architecture. From the outside it’s not always easy to get in. You can easily walk past without seeing an entrance. You can even walk underneath: Beech Street passes through a great underpass underneath Barbican. The secret is that you get around within the Barbican via ‘high walks’, pedestrian walkways a storey up. That means to get in you have to go up! Find a stairwell or escalators and make your way in.
Inside is a landscape of open courts, towers and criss-​crossing high walks. In some of the gaps are surviving older buildings, such as a church or parts of London’s ancient city walls. In others are gardens. It’s these gardens which are the really surprising feature of Barbican, giving a great feeling of space for such a densely populated development.
You’d do worse than to start off at the Barbican Centre or Library, which overlook Barbican’s most stunning vista. A huge rectangular courtyard, surrounded by piled, balconied apartments, dripping with plants, overlooked by walkways. Up the middle runs a great slash of a lake. At one end a great cataract, appearing seemingly from nowhere, plunges into the lake. It’s dramatic, and unexpected in the middle of London. On the lake itself there are fountains and strange almost-​islands on piers where you can sit surrounded by water.
Take a wander and find more of Barbican’s hidden secrets, though you should be prepared to be foiled by locked doors: some areas are for residents only. It’s best to visit on a bright sunny day: though at night it’s still dramatic with its soaring towers, in the evening the gardens at the Barbican are dark, and the fountains and cataract are turned off.