{"slug": "the-barbican", "title": "The Barbican", "summary": "The Barbican Estate in London, built between 1965 and 1976, is a residential complex designed as a maze where residents can live their entire lives without leaving, featuring amenities like underground parking, hidden resident-only areas, and a central heating system that cannot be individually controlled. The estate incorporates Roman and medieval ruins, a 1,000-year-old Jewish burial ground, and architectural nods to ancient Egypt and figures like Le Corbusier, with buildings named after famous English historical figures. It is a popular subject for media and architecture enthusiasts, offering resident-led tours that reveal intricate details such as its use as a filming location for *Slow Horses* and a dedicated online forum for residents.", "body_md": "The Barbican\nThree years ago, while searching for Vitsoe setups, I stumbled upon Barbican. I delved deeper and discovered a building complex that was beyond my imaginations.\nYoung Fatih would definitely find it ugly; current me finds it beautiful. The estate was built between 1965 and 1976. And, since I first saw it, I started watching and reading everything I could find. There are a few YouTube videos where you can peek into the lives of the residents. And there are a few books as well.\nOf course, my dream was to visit the actual place. Stay there for a few hours, and discover more about this grandiose place. When I had a chance to visit London a few weeks ago, I planned to visit the estate. I had to.\nWhile researching, I discovered that Barbican was far more than I had imagined. The residents offered architecture tours, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to attend one. I invited two friends along, and we embarked on a 2-hour-long tour.\nThe tour, which took almost two hours, felt like it was just 10 minutes long. Our tour guide informed us with hundreds of small details, a few of which stuck in my mind in no particular order. Here are some of them (all the photos where shoot with the Leica M11 + 35mm Summilux FLE btw)\n- Someone could start living as a single, marry someone, have kids, the kids could move out, the residents could die all in the same place. It has all the amenities someone would need to live there.\n- It's by design, created like a maze so people get lost. The tour guide even made a joke that there were no thieves in the Barbican, because once in, they don't know how to get out. (nit: our Tour Guide said a few times how he felt like he lives in a Prison where volunteers would pay to live there)\n- 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.\n- Buildings are named after famous English people lived in their times (i.e: Shakespeare tower)\n- The architects were inspired by ancient Egyptians and Battalions. A specific Egyptian Cartouche, resembling a rounded rectangle, is almost universally found.\n- There are places that only residents can enter, some of which are completely hidden from the public. The residents have a key fob that can open doors and hidden gateways, allowing them to enter the Barbican even directly from the underground subway.\n- The Slow Horses laundry scenes were shot in Barbican.\n- It was literally built on Roman and the Medieval ruins.\n- It contains a A 1000 year old Jewish burial ground as well.\n- There is central heating only, residents can't turn them off in the winter, leading to weird states where it gets just too hot or too cold sometimes.\n- The residents even have their own online forum sharing news/issues and recommendations between each other: barbicantalk.com\n- Each building has details that are an ode to certain famous architects and designers, such as Le Corbusier.\n- It's popular among media, architects and designers. Hence there is always a public photo or video shooting.\n- There is a branch of a Music school inside Barbican, and some parts of the building resembling a tuning fork.\nBarbican is full of treasures.\nAfter reading this you might be interested to learn more. Here are a few Book recommendations:\n- Barbican Residents: The book is mostly an interior design book, but only from people living in the various apartments in the Barbican Estate. Definitely a must buy if you're interested how the residents live there.\n- Barbican Estate: Released in 2019, it's a heavy coffee table book with lots of gorgeous photos about the Barbican\n- Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre: This book was released in 2022, and is currently the most up-to-date book about the Barbican. It is compiled by Nicholas Kenyon, the Barbican Centre's Managing Director 2007–2021, hence contains a lot of unknown information.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-barbican", "canonical_source": "https://arslan.io/2025/05/12/barbican-estate/", "published_at": "2025-05-12 14:00:08+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-23 18:40:37.333934+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": [], "entities": ["Barbican", "Vitsoe", "Leica M11", "London"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-barbican", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-barbican.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-barbican.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-barbican.jsonld"}}