(By Hugh Pearman. Published in The Sunday Times, 3rd March 2002, as “A Vision of Loveliness”).
Let us imagine a new Utopia. A densely-populated yet convivial townscape, where cars are banished, where public transport is good, where you can choose to walk to work, where you can wander from your cleverly-designed home past lakes and fountains to a café, to a cinema, theatre or concert hall. Where there is also an art gallery, museum, library, and school. Where all these things are world-class, the best you can find anywhere, and need no subsidy from the taxpayer. Is this an impossible dream? Could it ever happen in Britain? It could, and it already has. It is in London, and it is called The Barbican.
Would that be the same Barbican that is routinely derided as a windswept, brutally inhuman environment, a baffling labyrinth, a classic piece of 1960s megalomaniac city planning gone wrong, a bleak concrete neo-Corbusian high-rise experiment? Indeed it would. And is that the same Barbican that was last year officially listed in its entirety as a complex of high architectural and historic merit? It is. So there is a puzzling divergence of views, shall we say. What is it, then, the Barbican - a relic of past mistakes, or a model for the future?
