141–150 of 263 posts
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…
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Don’t forget the only reason the greenhouse (conservatory) exists is to camouflage the fly-tower from the theatre stage below!
It is! - except it's to hide the fly tower from the outside. The fly tower wasn't part of the original design. The first resident theatre company to be - the Royal Shakespeare company insisted upon one so the architects but came up with the genius idea of hiding it with a conservatory. I discovered this when working in the theatre space. I went exploring the fly tower (as you do) and opened a door at the top. I assum…
"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 th…
As a total noob about the cars or buying flats or the location you are from, my first though was that why didn't you get it fixed and drive it away. But you won't have the papers then. Do the scrap yards not accept it for the same reason?
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Name any art gallery which you think is a major art gallery, ie of comparable or greater size and prestige to the Barbican art gallery and is 15 minutes from the Barbican center, including by public transport? You can't, because there isn't one. You made an incorrect statement, and now you're defending it, but without providing any example at all of what you are claiming exists. So it's a little bit cheeky to claim t…
Tate Modern: 10 mins by bike https://maps.app.goo.gl/sdW7h8zMb7qj42Nd8?g_st=ic But if you really care about art then you aren’t going to limit yourself to “major” art galleries (again, speaking from experience here). This whole argument is absurd. I dont understand why you find it so controversial to claim that a flat in central London would be near pretty much anything you could want. Business district or not, I sta…
Read my comment again:
> It's the business district. If not for the Barbican, the nearest serious art gallery, repertory cinema, music auditorium, are all around half an hour away.
Your single 'counter-example' is a serious art gallery, which is around half an hour away...
"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 th…
While it doesn't stop cars from being abandoned "randomly", just the entire principle of having a paper trail for these things and creating a bunch of incentives to make sure that parking spots don't turn into trash heaps[0].
Especially now that I live in a place where street parking is a prime resource and yet people _who have garages_ still choose to street park out of convenience...
[0]: not always of course, I know about the trash houses
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It is! - except it's to hide the fly tower from the outside. The fly tower wasn't part of the original design. The first resident theatre company to be - the Royal Shakespeare company insisted upon one so the architects but came up with the genius idea of hiding it with a conservatory. I discovered this when working in the theatre space. I went exploring the fly tower (as you do) and opened a door at the top. I assum…
I wasn't sure what you were discussing. Like, what is a fly tower? So I went down a barbican rabbit hole and found this part of a video, where one of the theatre fly techs describes the same thing as you! https://youtu.be/uDdTUBk-qjo?t=140
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I wasn't sure what you were discussing. Like, what is a fly tower? So I went down a barbican rabbit hole and found this part of a video, where one of the theatre fly techs describes the same thing as you! https://youtu.be/uDdTUBk-qjo?t=140
Can’t watch the video. What is a fly tower?
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 conven…
I lived there for three years, rented a flat. Living in the Barbican was fantastic, livign in my flat was not fantastic. I used to joke it was a time machine to 1965. There was not only no dishwasher, there was literally no space for a dishwasher. Day one that seems funny, a few days later less so. I was spending a fortune in rent to spend 30 minutes every day handwashing my dishes. I did know people who had bought a…
Did you used to cook for the seven dwarves and their extended families, every day?
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Tate Modern: 10 mins by bike https://maps.app.goo.gl/sdW7h8zMb7qj42Nd8?g_st=ic But if you really care about art then you aren’t going to limit yourself to “major” art galleries (again, speaking from experience here). This whole argument is absurd. I dont understand why you find it so controversial to claim that a flat in central London would be near pretty much anything you could want. Business district or not, I sta…
Tate Modern (yes, it is definitely a major art gallery) is around half an hour from the Barbican center by foot, and around half an hour from the Barbican center by public transport. Read my comment again: > It's the business district. If not for the Barbican, the nearest serious art gallery, repertory cinema, music auditorium, are all around half an hour away . Your single 'counter-example' is a serious art gallery,…
You're a lot closer to everything in the Barbican than you are in Croydon or Enfield or Acton or Stratford.
London is big. The City is close enough to the centre that it is central, compared to most of London.
(Personally I think the Barbican is ugly, and I didn't like moving around in it, with long walkways forcing unnatural navigation. It only works, in so far as it works, due to a degree of elite mindshare capture keeping it owned and occupied by the wealthy. Put the same idea in Stratford and come back to somewhere far less pleasant in 20 years.)