It is commonplace to note that what was once radical becomes, with hindsight, considerably less so and more deeply embedded in history than we had initially thought. For example, the ‘86 Lloyd’s building, when looked at closely, becomes an exercise in continuity; history and context assert themselves. It’s a theme Peter Ackroyd takes up in what at first appears a rather fanciful manner in his excellent Biography of London: the notion that the city has a living character that surreptitiously asserts itself and affects what is done within its domain. Take the Wood Street area for example. Currently, it is a fascinating grouping of buildings, many of them very recent and including designs from Foster, Rogers, Farrell, and Grimshaw. These buildings can all be seen to be accommodating themselves to historical memory, traditions and the detritus history has left as a proliferation of churches, their towers, former graveyards, pieces of Roman and medieval defensive wall, and streets that have their historical roots in Roman and later Medieval times. For example, the Wood Street area of London was once a Roman fort; its principal north-south axis is now Wood Street and at its northern end was a gateway that became known as Cripplegate (adjacent to St. Giles Church, which still stands, now within the Barbican).
The physical manifestation of this rich history was badly damaged (and in many instances obliterated) in the Blitz of World War II. Christopher Wren’s church of St. Alban’s, for example, survived only as a tower — the one that now stands in the centre of a widened street — and one has to imagine a scene that for many years took on a curiously romantic character as nature populated the ruins (of what had formerly been a garment area of large Victorian warehouses) with grasses and pretty wild flowers. David Kynaston describes the Barbican area as, for many years, ‘virtually a wild heath, littered with the remnants of a commercial civilisation’. But the LCC planners saw it all as a massive opportunity to march optimistically into the future, taking the relaxed building controls of the mid-1950’s as an opportunity to offer the City a realigned London Wall (‘Route Eleven’, the making of which unearthed hundreds of human skulls) and the Barbican.
And yet, in the 60 years since the Blitz and its devastation, the area has increasingly settled back into a manifest history. The Barbican — as an unconscious reinvention of the Roman fort — carefully knits its way around old Roman walls like an elephant avoiding eggshells; the Guildhall reconstructed its ruinously damaged halls and demarcated the line of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in the paving of its piazza; McMorran’s police station reinvented the prisons of the street; Alban Gate attempted to recreate Cripplegate; and modern temples to Mammon from Foster, Grimshaw and Rogers nestle up against preserved former churchyards.
42 The Barbican, Silk Street, EC1 by Chamberlin Powell & Bon, is a classic 1950’s dream of regeneration, replacing an area that was heavily bombed during WWII. A key planning concept at the time concerned enthusiasms for elevated pedestrian walkways and decks. When debated in 1959, one City Deputy suggested that, ‘opposition to elevated walkways was based on prejudice’ and that ‘once people were up on the walkways there was no need for them to come down at all — until they wanted to go home’. The notion developed into plans for a thirty mile City network, only abandoned after the early 1970’s property boom collapsed and alarmed conservationist sentiments were reversing the lack of perceived value in anything Victorian or the City’s medieval street pattern, significant parts of it obliterated by highway widening schemes that accompanied the pedway scheme. The concept was meant to slowly insinuate its way across the City as buildings were replaced and remnants can still be found in unlikely locations, e. g. opposite the north side of Lloyd’s, waiting for Lutyens’ Midland Bank building to be demolished.
It was a planning concept that entirely missed the opportunity to develop the network of City back streets and alleys (as at Leadenhall Market or Bow Lane), allowing pedestrians a choice: either to tackle the traffic and fumes, or wind one’s way through back streets alive with the kinds of activities developers deny and frequently replace by blue plaques noting the former location of a coffee house or some such.
The Barbican development itself (1957 – 79) is one large, ‘gated’ deck serving private apartments, an arts centre and schools, at the heart of which is a central landscaped area complete with lake, ornamental medieval church (St. Giles) and what the Pevsner guide now describes as a ‘thrillingly vertiginous crossing’ slung at high level between gigantic concrete columns (visitors no doubt following the painted yellow lines on the paving so they don’t get lost whilst seeking the arts centre). The composition comprises tower blocks and terraces, all of it monolithic and ‘brutalist’, providing an experience that mixes exhilaration with hesitation. No one says so, but its success owes, one suspects, as much to a sustained middle-class content as any design feature.
The Barbican’s Waterside Cafe was refurbished in 2002 by Allford Hall Monoghan Morris. The same architects are also responsible for a current masterplan for the arts centre (and they have continued to do interior work since then, removing some awful additions to the original work and generally restoring the centre to habitability and lending it a more civil tone).
Л Л Golden Lane, EC1, immediately north of the Barbican and preceding it in design, is a classic post-war example belonging to an era when few self-respecting architects would dream of working for a ‘commercial’ (i. e. private) practice and most wore a left-wing, humanist bias on their sleeve. It is designed by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon (1952-62) as something distinctly urbane, without garden suburb association. The principal block has a remarkable roof-line which lifts the less expressive architecture of the lower parts. Ignored or derided for years, the development — like many similar ‘50’s and ’60’s schemes — is now prime home-hunting territory for young architects.