The residents are already on to you.
The Barbican
221–230 of 263 posts
Re: The Barbican
#222"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…
Kinda weird that it would hard to track down the owner of a car. Technically you can get the own from the VIN, which may be the estate for a deceased person. Getting them to actually take action is a different matter obviously
Re: The Barbican
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was not only no dishwasher, there was literally no space for a dishwasher. This is quite common for older places in the UK. Some places might have been updated to allow for a dishwasher, but there are probably rules against that in the Barbican.
To my knowledge there are no rules against it, it is just a major and expensive plumbing project requiring redoing the whole kitchen. And so as a landlord why bother, you will always find someone willing to rent, no matter how unlivable the place. This dynamic was hardly unique to the Barbican, it was the reality of being a tenant in London, and ultimately one of the reasons I left. London's housing stock is just ter…
You can get a dishwasher that sits on the counter, filled from a tap connector. Space might be tight though.
Re: The Barbican
#224Even though it serves as expensive housing for private purchase, it still manages to exude Soviet central-planned estate vibes.
Walking around this imposing concrete structure, you feel its soullessness and brutalism. They made attempts to introduce greenery (like the temperate greenhouse area), but in the 21st century those areas are tired, poorly maintained and generally devoid of any visitors. The glass is misty or greening. The water features are stagnant. The concrete has aged poorly, with cracking and visible degradation.
London is full of beautiful Victorian and Georgian architecture, so brutalist concrete buildings look cringeworthy by comparison.. but they do seem to tickle the fancy of the socialist intelligentia, who love to proclaim how clever it all is - clever in a way that the common non-socialist folk simply wouldn't understand.
Re: The Barbican
#225It'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…
Lived in London for 20 years, rented 7 or 8 different flats in that time, none of them had a dishwasher and most of them didn't have space for one. Didn't know what I was missing. Moving out of London and finally using a dishwasher was a lifechanging experience.
Re: The Barbican
#226It is utterly weird to me that so many commenters here appreciate the Barbican's aesthetics. To me, it is an ugly eyesore that's a legacy of the brutalist wave of the mid-20th century. I lived close to it (in Islington) for many months, and avoided walking through it to get to the City (where I worked).
Brutalism was a reactionary movement against ornate Victorian and Georgian architecture, which was seen as elitist and emblematic of the "property owning class"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
> In the United Kingdom, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world, while being echoed by similar styles like in Eastern Europe
So beware the vocal minority of English socialists that have a politically-tainted take on this architecture.
The rest of us agree with you. It's offensively ugly!
Re: The Barbican
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
My appreciation of Brutalist architecture seems to be in direct proportion to the number of plants it incorporates. A Brutalist building with zero plants looks like a totalitarian prison hellscape designed to destroy your soul before it destroys your body. A Brutalist building surrounded by trees with every nook containing greenery and vines dangling down looks like some kind of idyllic Star Wars planet populated by…
Agreed. I think greenery and water enhances most architectural styles, but Brutalism is the only one that absolutely _requires_ it. I wonder how differently the perception of the style would be if the Brutalist estates in the UK that became a byword for grimness and ugliness had been embowered and properly maintained by their housing groups and local councils.
There's only so far you can economically maintain a building of bare concrete in a damp maritime climate like the UK I think, the porous material is just going to be a nightmare when it doesn't dry out for much of the year.
I don't like Brutalism in general, but it looks a lot less ugly somewhere sunny like Spain or the South of France than the UK in my opinion.
Re: The Barbican
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> There was not only no dishwasher, there was literally no space for a dishwasher. This is just London, out of the 8 years I've spent here, 3 of them were spent with a dishwasher. Tbh I've got a dishwasher now and barely use it.
> This is just London, out of the 8 years I've spent here, 3 of them were spent with a dishwasher. Tbh I've got a dishwasher now and barely use it.
Do you wash by hand then? I'm curious why someone would opt to not use a dishwasher if they have one. In my ranking it's the third most essential appliance, after a washing machine and a fridge. I probably would rather give up warm water than my dishwasher.
Re: The Barbican
#229It is utterly weird to me that so many commenters here appreciate the Barbican's aesthetics. To me, it is an ugly eyesore that's a legacy of the brutalist wave of the mid-20th century. I lived close to it (in Islington) for many months, and avoided walking through it to get to the City (where I worked).
Brutalism was a reactionary movement against ornate Victorian and Georgian architecture, which was seen as elitist and emblematic of the "property owning class" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture > In the United Kingdom, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world, while being echoed…
To me it's a totalitarian style, it tells people 'I'm unashamedly ugly and I couldn't care any less what you think about that'. It goes out of its way to be imposing and institutional as though it's designed not for humans but for entirely fungible economic resources who in time will be burned up and discarded.
It's ironic the style is so strongly associated with socialism I think because it's much more 'dark Satanic mills' than 'England's green and pleasant land'.
Re: The Barbican
#230If you wanna get some more footage of the buildings and inhabitants, I can recommend checking out Bêka & Lemoine's "Barbicania" --- https://vimeo.com/ondemand/barbicania This site also seems to have lots of background info and details on various aspects of the buildings, though I haven't explored in depth --- https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk
TIL about this, thanks so much.