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The Barbican

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723 points farslan | 5 comments | 12 May 25 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.598s | source
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KaiserPro ◴[12 May 25 17:00 UTC] No.43965153[source]▶
RANT ALERT:

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.

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1. eilzo ◴[12 May 25 17:45 UTC] No.43965653[source]▶
The Barbican was never built as social housing - the intended occupants were always central London professional workers and they charged market rates.
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2. notahacker ◴[12 May 25 19:03 UTC] No.43966458[source]▶
Which in a way actually does align with the OP's view on why it never became known as a dangerous sketchy place.

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

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3. empath75 ◴[12 May 25 19:31 UTC] No.43966686[source]▶
Yeah, there's an _artistry_ to the barbican that isn't captured by just listing off the features of the complex and apartments. Whoever designed it had excellent _taste_.
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4. KaiserPro ◴[12 May 25 20:34 UTC] No.43967172{3}[source]▶
I mean kinda.

But a _lot_ of council estates were well designed, but suffered from failed assumptions. The underground parking in the barbican for example was the same design that cause so many issues for estates elsewhere. They were hidden and that meant crime, unless there was tight access control.

https://modernistpilgrimage.com/2015/10/18/trellick-tower-lo... The trellick tower is fucking ugly on the outside, just like the barbican, but even the trellick has some smashing design features. Like most estates at the time, the three bed flats had an upstairs. Not only that, they were bright! Had a balcony.

The difference between the trellick and the barbican is the barbican had middle class people growing plants on the balcony. Until the hipsters moved in, the trellick just had shit.

https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/ has some brilliant insight into council housing, the history, the plans and lots and lots of pictures.

I think the biggest thing to take away is that for a long while council housing _had_ to be better than private. It was partly slum clearance, partly vote winning, partly "you fought for this in the war" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Morris_Committee has the general plan.

Separate kitchens, storage, decent square footage, working heating as a _minimum_ something which even 500k flats struggle to do now.

5. KaiserPro ◴[12 May 25 20:46 UTC] No.43967293[source]▶
Thats my point, because it wasn't run within the confines of the 1970+ social housing straight jacket (funding not dependent on tenants, no ability to control who was placed in there, centralised funding formula that meant you might gets loads of money one year, and none over the next ten.)