The Barbican Estate: What it's like to live in an architectural icon
The most unique place to live in London? Probably.
Hello! In the seven weeks since I finally relinquished my Barbican flat and temporarily moved in with my dad in Yorkshire, I’ve also been back to London, to Scotland, and now I’m in London again. I’ll often stay in hotels in the centre of town, but this time I’ve taken up residence in my friends’ empty bedrooms, road-testing different areas before I move back here.
There’s nothing else to report from April, as I was ill for three out of four weeks. I’ve learnt that when your life implodes, your immune system self-destructs in sympathy. It was the fourth virus I’d caught in three months, and honestly, if one more fucking germ finds me, I’m leaning into it and going full Colin from The Secret Garden. When I got back from the press trip to Scotland, I walked in to the sound of my dad and stepmum coughing emphatically back and forth, like a game of ping-pong. At that point, I took to hiding in my bedroom with the windows open. I’m living in a plague house.
Anyway, before it becomes a distant memory, I wanted to write about what it’s like to live in the Barbican Estate: a place so well known within certain circles that it’s a tourist destination in its own right.
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Barbican: a quick introduction
For the unfamiliar, the Barbican Estate is a Brutalist post-war housing development in central London, just inside the remains of the Roman city walls. People are either madly in love with it and dream of living there, or they can’t stand the place and think it’s the ugliest building they’ve ever seen. It’s rare to find indifference. A grey concrete monolith in an often-grey city isn’t for everyone, but I love it, and if I had a spare £850k for a one-bedroom flat, I’d be back there right now.
Barbican was built to replace an area of London destroyed during World War II (the first bomb of the Blitz landed on my street), and the residential part of the estate took around a decade to complete, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. It’s big enough to feel like a village within a city, and it covers a whole tube stop on the London Underground, with Barbican station on the west of the estate and Moorgate station on the east. It’s maze-like by design, and it looks impenetrable from outside, with discreet entrances, hidden staircases, and buildings connected by raised walkways called the Highwalk. I’ve spent many a half-hour shepherding bewildered tourists from one side of the estate to the other, as they fret about missing the start of a show.
Inside its fortified walls, there are more than 2,000 flats, three private gardens, lakes, a shop, a theatre and arts centre hosting world-class concerts and exhibitions, a cinema, a library, cafes, a nursery, a conservatory, a medieval church, and a girls’ school. The Guildhall School of Music & Drama is also sandwiched between the arts centre and one of the residential blocks. There are over 100 different flat layouts within the estate (known as ‘types’, and they’re all numbered – I’ve lived in a type 21, a 57 and a 58). They range in size from studios that only just fit a bed to townhouses with double-height windows and roof gardens.
It’s a common misconception that Barbican was built as social housing. It is owned by the City of London Corporation, but it was never a council estate. The flats were designed for middle-class professionals, and they were all rented at market rate. This was before the Right to Buy scheme offered tenants the best investment they’d ever make. We paid more in rent over the past seven years than our landlords paid to buy the flat. There are a couple of promo videos from 1969 here and here, if you fancy!
When your address becomes your personality
When I first moved into journalism, I quickly learnt that having a semi-famous address is a useful conversation topic to wheel out at work dinners, especially if you’re seated next to someone who asks where you live, and their face lights up as they tell you they’ve already done the architecture tour. Living in the Barbican started to feel like an integral part of my job. A styling prop, of sorts. It made a memorable background for my photos, and later, brands started featuring me in various ‘At home with…’ interviews. It undoubtedly gave me a leg-up in those early days of hustling for work in the London design world, when I didn’t have contacts or a way in. People followed me on Instagram because they loved the Barbican, and it was through Instagram that I landed the weekly newspaper column that opened the door to everything else. I stand by my work and my taste, but I’m not delusional – it’s the building I lived in that made me stand out.
The Barbican Estate: a place for people who like rules
I rented three Barbican flats over a span of 12 years, so I’ve been around the block. Three different blocks, actually. Speed, Defoe, and Andrewes. Barbican is a particular place for particular people, and there are specific rules to live by if you want to live there. These are just some of them:
No pets allowed (but if you ask around, you’ll find a healthy supply of illegal house cats).
No noisy work at weekends, and none before 10am or after 4pm on weekdays, so don’t even think about hanging a picture or a bookshelf on a Saturday.
Ideally, there’s no moving in or out of a flat at weekends because you’ll hog the lift and the clattering around will disturb your neighbours.
No ball games, large parties, BBQs, or portable speakers in the gardens. Every summer, some fresh neighbour-to-neighbour beef kicks off when someone decides to ‘reserve’ all the garden benches for their kid’s birthday party.
All floors in the living area, hallways and bedroom should be carpeted (people turn a blind eye to this, but our landlords valiantly kept the same carpet down for 20 years, and I assume they’re aiming for another 20).
Absolutely no putting your laundry airer out on the balcony on a sunny day (or ever). Other residents won’t stand for your exuberant washing-drying ways, and there are eyes everywhere. You can expect to be shamed in the estate WhatsApp group.
I’ve never taken the Barbican architecture tour (they used to stand across from my bedroom window several times a week), but I hear they tell tour groups that all curtains have to be white or cream for a uniform look. Total rubbish – it’s not true.
The concrete planters on balconies are supposed to be maintained and filled with flowers at all times. No one enforces this. I spent circa £1,000 on plants over the last seven years; not one of them survived my excessive affection, crowding, poor soil maintenance, or overwatering.
No audible noise whatsoever after 11pm. My neighbours two floors up missed this memo when they used to partake in midnight vacuuming of their laminate floor.
No flushing of the Garchey after 11pm. It’s loud when it flushes.
The goddamn Garchey:
What’s a Garchey? Glad you asked! It’s a monstrous, stinking waste disposal system that was installed in the kitchen sink of every flat because Le Corbusier used them first, and the Barbican architects were major fanboys of his. The idea is you flush kitchen waste (not just food – even tin cans) down a giant plughole in a second sink, and it all gets washed into an underground tank. This waste isn’t recycled or turned into something useful – it’s broken down with toxic chemicals and taken away by lorries to god knows where. If you live on the lower floors (and we did), gases from rotting food are pushed out into your flat whenever your upstairs neighbours flush their Garchey (they’re all connected in a stack), so our kitchen would often smell of farts. You can have them removed, and plenty do, but it costs thousands. Scented candles do a lot of heavy lifting!
Original kitchens
Having the original galley-style Brooke Marine kitchen (designed by yacht makers to maximise usable space) is still a selling point. I’ve had one in all three of my rented flats, and I loved the stainless steel worktops, the sliding glass pocket door, and the slightly sparse, clinical look that I wouldn’t choose otherwise, but which suits Barbican flats so well.
Original kitchens have a few recognisable details: four hobs in a row across the countertop, a pull-out breakfast bar, oversized white knobs for the hob, and a bizarre placement of the stainless steel plug sockets that always irritated me. They’re at eye level, high above the counter, so any appliances plugged in have ugly trailing cables, and I don’t understand how that wasn’t considered. There are passive vents to circulate the air, but people add modern extractor fans to their kitchens (another rule broken), and they’re powerful enough to push cooking smells into the bathroom and WC ventilation shafts of surrounding flats. It’s a unique experience to go for a pee and know that Roger upstairs is frying onions…
With a few top-floor exceptions, Barbican kitchens don’t have windows, but they do have a serving hatch through to the living room. My last landlords blocked ours up with glass bricks, so the kitchen was always dark and cupboard-like. Though the glass bricks ended up being quite a vibe by the time we moved out, since they were coincidentally having a design renaissance.
Original bathrooms
Unless you’re on the top floor, your bathroom doesn’t have a window either, so you’ll find it infuriatingly prone to mould. The combination bath/shower in several flat types shares a wall with the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom next door, so water damage is a rite of passage when the plumbing is 50+ years old. The damp patches and paint bubbling in our wardrobe were so bad that we had to tape bin bags across the walls to protect our clothes. Design-wise, the long horizontal mirror, hidden medicine cabinet and uniform square tiles from floor-to-ceiling look strong and intentional. Most bathrooms have a tiled countertop that spans the width of the room, but the dead space underneath it feels wasted for a small flat with very little storage. When people get their bathrooms redone, they almost always add fitted cupboards under the counter. In all but the smallest Barbican flats, the toilet is in a separate WC next door, with the iconic Twyfords sink, designed especially for the tight space.
Other things to know:
Each block has 24-hour concierge known as car park attendants, which is wildly reductive considering all they do. They sign for and store parcels, they’re on the phone to repairs when there’s a 4am leak from a flat upstairs, they herd teenagers out of the garden who’ve broken in at night to get stoned on the waterfall, they offer shoulders to cry on, terrible dad jokes, and safety when you’re walking home through the car park at 1am and there’s no one else around. Shout-out to Rob, Steve, and David for being the best.
You never have to worry about ‘bin day’. There’s a tall cupboard with two-way access next to everyone’s front door, and you just leave your bin bags inside, then a cleaner collects them from the other side every morning. When they take the used bags, they leave new ones to replace them. It’s so easy!
You can’t control your own heating in Barbican, so if you’re freezing or sweltering, you have to buy an electric heater or open all the windows. Every year, there are pages of exasperated heating chat on the Barbican forum – there’s even an Underfloor Heating Working Party. Most people are like Goldilocks, and they’re never just right. The underfloor heating is controlled by the estate office, and it’s included in the service charge. They turn it off in April and back on in October. All flats get the same amount of heat regardless of their inside temperature, so the well-insulated ones in the middle of blocks might sometimes have all the windows open in March because they’re ready to faint, but people living on the first or top floors with single-glazing are wearing gloves indoors because there’s nothing above or below to keep the heat from escaping. Some might say it’s a hot topic…
All residents have a magic key, which not only opens their own front door, but also the main doors to every other building and garden gate in the estate. I really didn’t want to give up my access to the garden – it was my favourite thing about living there.
Bills are delightfully affordable in Barbican. There’s no gas, heating is included in the service charge, and it has one of the cheapest council tax rates in the whole of London.
There’s an unspoken hierarchy of Barbican blocks, depending on whether you’re in one of the outer buildings that only contain studio flats, one of the ‘premium’ low-rise blocks such as Mountjoy House or Gilbert House, which straddle the lakes with no road outside, the townhouses, or the heady heights of the three towers. The high-rise towers are the only buildings your key won’t get you into if you don’t live in one. They have a manned reception desk making sure the riffraff from the less expensive flats can’t go for a joyride in the lifts.
You might assume having a Barbican address gets you discounted tickets to the theatre, money off at the gift shop, residents-only access to the conservatory, etc. It doesn’t! On the plus side, you can pop to the cinema in your slippers without needing a jacket and take your own cup of tea. And on Mondays, tickets are only £7.
Having lakes and fountains and tourists around all day feels a bit like you’re living in a cheerful holiday resort, in the best way. The gardens don’t even feel like you’re in London, as they’re at a sunken level and you can’t see beyond the surrounding flats. I used to love drinking coffee on a bench, listening to the birds sing while the toddlers from the nursery run around the playground like miniature drunks. Hang around long enough, and you’ll see overconfident squirrels, far too many ducks, moorhens, visiting pairs of Egyptian geese, a resident heron, urban foxes, and once a solo rabbit that lived in the bushes.
There’s asbestos everywhere. I probably breathed some in last year when a handyman smashed the edges of an asbestos access panel in our WC, and I swept and vacuumed the debris without a mask. It’s also inside the bin cupboard doors, around some of the kitchen hobs, and in the original concrete planters. Fun!
During lockdown, they took all the benches away and removed access to the gardens, aside from permission to walk a loop around the periphery path as daily exercise. I remember looking out of my window one day at a woman reading a book on the grass, wearing Lycra and very occasionally doing a downward dog to claim it as a workout if anyone questioned her. An icon! On another day, it was so hot that a few people started sitting out on the grass – several metres apart – but someone saw and called the police to eject everyone. Barbican residents love a rule, a formal complaint, and a curtain twitch to see what their neighbours are up to. I should know – I was always ratting on mine for throwing noisy parties on his balcony.
There’s only one on-site convenience store, and it’s the least convenient shop I’ve ever known. It’s called Geranium (named after the unofficial Barbican windowbox flower), and it opens maybe three days a week, sometimes only for two or three hours. It feels like unfair retail space monopolising if you ask me. There are more than 4,000 residents who don’t want to go to Pret for their nearest croissants. The place is crying out for an independent deli/grocery shop that’s actually open, and a satellite bakery and coffee shop.
There are a few WhatsApp groups for various purposes, and they all restore my faith in humanity and community. One of them is solely dedicated to borrowing things from neighbours who might have what you need, like step ladders and whisks.
Sometimes, film and TV premieres are held on the Lakeside Terrace outside the Barbican Centre, and this is how I came to stand about six feet from Tom Hanks last year when I was cutting across the estate on my way home from the supermarket and noticed the red carpet.
Every weekend, the estate is full of people filming music videos on the Highwalk underneath flats (they want a gritty setting that’s giving Top Boy, without any chance of actual trouble). There are also constant photoshoots, major film productions, dance troupes, and Gary Oldman is around a couple of times a year filming Slow Horses. During the pandemic, Harry Styles filmed the video for As It Was on the deserted school terrace opposite my bedroom window. I was out at a meeting that morning and missed it, but I’ve seen 76,897 renditions of the dance from his young fans, who film themselves recreating it in the same spot, day after day. It’s the best place to people-watch. I love it. I loved it all.
Photo by Daniel Moore on Unsplash 
This is the letting agent link to our actual flat (and there’s a bad video tour in there too), if you’re curious enough to see where I lived for the past seven years.
It’s still available at the time of writing, but I can’t recommend taking it unless the landlords decide to do a refurb (unlikely), as the carpet is ancient and needs to be replaced. Also, being on the first floor with no flat below, it’s so cold in winter!
If there’s anything you’ve always wondered about life in Barbican that I didn’t cover above, feel free to ask in the comments below!
E xx
The detail that jumped out at me: kitchens with no windows, bathrooms with no windows, and a heating system residents can't control — in a building otherwise celebrated for its design.
This is a perfect example of how even the most thoughtful architecture can get the fundamentals wrong when natural light and environmental autonomy aren't treated as non-negotiables.
And then the thing you loved most about the place was the gardens, the wildlife, the lake view from your bedroom. The parts where nature got in. That's not a coincidence. Those are the elements that actually regulate our nervous systems. I write about this intersection (how environment shapes how we function) and reading your experience of the Barbican is one of the best lived examples I've come across. Loved this.
Omg, I’d completely forgotten the BEO removed all the benches during the pandemic! Crazy times, but it’s also when we met.
Being a Barbican resident for over a decade has become a huge part of who I am. It’s been gut-wrenching having to leave, and not just because I now have to buy my own bin bags and take them outside. Like you, I lived in a variety of flats including one I absolutely hated. However, Barbican is such a special place, that one puts up with a lack of light, sauna like conditions and hideous furnishings because well, it’s Barbican. Easily the best place I have ever lived in London, and the only place I want to live. Even now I am living elsewhere albeit it temporarily, am still in Barbican several times a week - indeed, am due there later today. I do believe that Barbican is City of London's Hotel California; you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
PS. So glad you’re back in London.