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.

6k is pretty typical for any premium apartments in London. That's actually pretty cheap for that location.

Oh no. £14k/year. I guess I won't buy that £2.5m central London flat after all.

The inaccesibility for mere mortals ruins any claim it has to being a representative of brutalism, IMO. Of course it looks nice, it was made by the City of London at eyewatering cost with absurd levels of craftmanship. The movement wouldn't have such a bad image if other buildings had that kind of budget for upkeep and gardening. But they don't: they're rotten and barren.

That’s on the cheap end of zone 1 London for service charges, especially anything with a porter and gardeners. If you were buying now you’d renew the lease for about £20k, which is a tiny fraction of the purchase price you’d be paying. (Source: did it in 2022)

If you don't already own a flat in the Barbican, but plan to move there, than the service charges and the leasehold are immaterial to you.

If they lowered the service charges tomorrow, that would just mean that the headline market price of the apartments would go up to compensate.

If they moved from leasehold to freehold tomorrow, you would also see that reflected in the price.

It doesn't actually look nice in person, and the craftsmanship ain't anything to write home about. (However I can believe the claims of eyewatering cost.)

The shoddy windows are particularly easy to spot, even in the pictures in the article. I'm not even sure these would be legal in Germany.

Half of the population of the City of London (aka the square mile) is in the Barbican. There is hardly any location to compare it to.

Hmm, I can't make out the windows. I did used to know someone who lived in City of London flats with single glazing on the thirteenth floor. Nice view but you could feel the heat leaking out and the wind battering them if the weather got up. UK is desperately unserious about windows.

You're being downvoted for calling the Barbican a rotting piece of shit that's slowly falling apart.

I think it's a cool building for sure, but like many buildings in the UK (including people's houses) it isn't well taken care of and you can see how grotty the surfaces are on the facade, how things need to be repaired & fixed.

I'm looking to buy a house here and walking down streets of so many areas it's just crazy how people don't take pride in water blasting their driveway or the facade of their house, even things like fixing broken/cracked windows.

And then stupid fucking trends like extending your house with an open conservatory and treating it like another normal room...a single layer of brick in a country that gets cold & wet in Winter! What the hell!

There's quite a lot of housing just outside the City boundary in Shoreditch and Farringdon, the latter being easily comparable to Barbican as it's the next stop on the tube.