BRIEFING
The Ground We Stand On Diana Souhami
discovers cowslips, verbena and forget-me-nots in between the concrete and red tiles of the Barbican high walk The station for the Barbican exits on to the dense traffic of Aldersgate Street. There is a way to avoid the miasma of fumes and pollutants. By the exit, footprints captioned ‘cleaner air’ point up steps that lead across a road bridge, onto a highwalk and into 35 acres of traffic-free urban landscape. This highwalk, called the Podium, is 6 metres above ground. There is the sound of water, fountains and birds, a strange sense of disorientation and a unique concrete vista of jagged skyscrapers, terrace blocks, bridges, lakes and gardens, alleys and crescents, all connected by mystifying walkways. Six thousand people live in this landscape, more than a million visit its cultural centre each year. Getting lost in the Barbican is de rigueur. ‘You are here’ signage points to St Paul’s and Moorgate, the Museum of London, St Giles’s Church, the Postern, Lakeside, Shakespeare Tower, Wallside, the Sculpture Park, the Centre, Defoe House, the Guildhall, Cheapside and more. Invariably, someone is asking ‘Where am I?’ or ‘How do I get out of here?’ The warren of walkways snakes through the Barbican fortress. At the perimeter boundaries, month on 46
month, new high rise blocks encroach. They cannot enter. In 2001 the Barbican was accorded Grade II listed status. It was the largest built object ever listed. It was like giving such status to a town the size of Hebden Bridge. The Barbican’s architects, Chamberlin, Powell & Bonn worked to a noble concept. From a site of rubble caused by Luftwaffe bombs in August 1940, they designed this unique urban neighbourhood. They copied from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille; from Georgian London’s garden squares and crescents and from Victorian domestic terraces. Their vision was to provide a community with all they could want of home and art and recreation. There is incongruity and deception in these concrete walkways. They are covered with a vast mosaic of small brick-sized brindled red tiles, stretching and circling and bordering waterfalls, ponds and raised gardens. These tiles are ludicrously dainty in such a vast space and took years to lay.
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Chamberlin, Powell & Bonn never intended a brutal architecture. Their 1959 plan envisaged their terrace blocks covered with little white ‘riven’ marble tiles. They wanted the balconies surfaced with mosaic tiles, the concrete columns that hold up the buildings to be polished and coloured, the towers polished white. The Corporation of London rejected their proposal as too costly. Rough concrete
1. Standing on the high walkway overlooking the new landscape designed by Nigel Dunnett. 2. Bull hammered concrete contrasts with terracotta tiles.
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was the suggested economy. The architects made a virtue of necessity and ‘pick hammered’ the concrete to give it texture and to make it live. Only the walkways kept the jewelled intention. Over time rainwater leaked through the tiles into the car parks and buildings below. In 2013 swathes of the highwalk were re-waterproofed and re-tiled. The landscape architect Nigel Dunnett replanted the gardens. Using hardy plants, he created successive waves of colour from spring to autumn, with seed heads, grasses, shapes and foliage for the winter months. And so, high above the city jams, there is a kaleidoscope of colour, a riot of form – tulips, cowslips, and blossom trees, verbena and forget-me-nots, mahonia and hellebores, aquilegia, anemones, asters and ferns. To wander the Barbican walkways is to immerse in a unique history of London’s postwar architecture. This clever urban landscape is not brutal. It is ambitious, elemental, frivolous, surprising. The setting sun reflects in the glass of the Barbican towers and rekindles light. In spring wrens and blackbirds nest on the terraces. I have seen a fox in the grasses. Goldfinches visit. Diana Souhami is the author of biographies, plays and short stories. Her latest book No Modernism Without Lesbians will be published on 2 April 2020 by Head of Zeus.
