The Barbican

"There’s an underground parking garage for the residents, but half of it is empty and filled with 20-30-year-old cars whose owners are no longer known."

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.

It's one of my favorite places to spend time when in London. It's comfortable, clean, quiet, aesthetically striking, easy to loaf around at, and there's high brow art in numerous forms to enjoy – it's kinda like BBC Radio 3 if it were a neighborhood. It's also five minutes from the Elizabeth Line and the parking is good which is unusual for the City. It's strikingly non-commercial - there are no chains or even convenience stores there, though there is a fantastic music shop. It's one of those rare places you can feel more intelligent and cultured by merely being there.

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.

The Barbican is such a striking example of an architectural utopia, built not just as housing, but as a statement about how people could live, work, and engage with culture in one integrated space.

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.

So strange to talk about the Barbican Centre as a curiousity and to not mention the greenhouse! I used to work around the area and would take 'short cuts' from the Barbican tube station through the Barbican Centre to the City. I got lost many, many times, would end up in dead ends, or the other side of lakes to where I wanted to be. Or stuck behind a metal gate I could not open. The place often taunts you with a view of right where you want to be but from behind a thin metal fence or gate that requires a key or fob.

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...

Part of the thinking behind the Barbican's somewhat hidden entrances to the estate and tts maze-like layout was that they would reduce foot traffic, and it totally worked. Not many people use the public estate high-walks as a shortcut to get across the City. This has a wonderful effect wherein you're surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the City, while being just a touch insulated from it.

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.

The apartments are lovely, but the service charges are eye-watering, ranging from around £6,000 per year for a two-bedroom, to £14,400 for the more expensive ones:

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.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the concert hall. It's one of London's most famous, with almost 2000 seats, and it's the London Symphony Orchestra's main home.

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

My office was right next to Barbican, I was going to rent a place there but I cheaped out. Still bitter about it.

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

Possibly getting some more attention now because of some scenes from Andor 2 that were shot there: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/1kb8k4u/lloyds_of_l...

This was great and the photos were good too!

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67

Here's a cross-section through the theatre portion of the Barbican showing the complexity of the engineering:

https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/5w9ep7/cross_...

One thing that I think is underappreciated as a distinguishing factor of brutalism is how three-dimensional it is.

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.