Barbican Guide
August 2020

Welcome from our Managing Director

Welcome to our August Guide. It’s wonderful that we can finally start to enjoy culture and creativity together again as the Barbican gradually reopens.

As well as visiting the Conservatory and the exhibitions in our Art Gallery and The Curve, you can enjoy our iconic architecture – our assistant curator Jon Astbury shares some inspiration for your visit in this Guide.

We know that not everyone will be able to join us in person, so we have just launched a Cinema on Demand streaming service, and there’s plenty of entertaining digital content to enjoy on the Read, Watch & Listen section of our website.

We know these are difficult times for many, but if you can, we’d love you to show your support by making a donation. It means we can help more people discover and love the arts.

We look forward to seeing you very soon!

Nick Kenyon, Managing Director

One thing we’ve missed during lockdown is sitting in the cinema, watching films from around the world. While nothing can replace the experience of seeing them on a huge screen, our brand new Cinema on Demand service means you won’t miss movies that have been handpicked by our curators and other organisations we work with.

Featuring the best international films and hidden cinematic gems, independent new release films, exclusive one-off titles, and seasons, the programme changes regularly, just like at the Barbican.

This month the selection includes Papicha (2019), focussing on the lives of a group of women living in Algeria in the 1990s. As they navigate increasing religious and social conservatism, one of the women is met with extreme hostility, when she decides to organise a protest fashion show.

Perfect 10 (2019) is the first feature from Scottish writer/director, Eva Riley. The film follows aspiring teenage gymnast, Leigh (Frankie Box) whose life is forever changed by the appearance of the brother she never knew she had.

Socrates (2018) is the debut by Brazilian-American filmmaker Alexandre Moratto and was executive produced by Academy-Award nominated director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener, The Two Popes) – a gritty tale of the life of the titular teenager who finds himself living on the margins of São Paulo's coast after the death of his beloved mother.

Our Forbidden Colours series features romance Jose (2018), a rare and powerful portrait of gay life in Guatemala. As part of Architecture on Film we have The Proposal, a documentary about an artist recovering the works of architect Luis Barragán from a Swiss bunker.

For decades, the Guildhall School’s annual opera double bill has been a key fixture in its calendar – the culmination of hard work by students and teachers.

This year, it was preparing a 20th-century reimagining of Purcell’s famous Dido and Aeneas, contrasted with Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco, a witty take on the Sleeping Beauty story.

But when the Coronavirus pandemic struck, suddenly it looked like the stage would be silent.

‘The initial “oh my gosh” moment became a determination to not let the pandemic beat us,’ says conductor and Head of Opera, Dominic Wheeler. ‘It wasn’t so much about “how can we make a production” as “how do we ensure our students are being educated, developed, trained, and creatively engaged through this process?”.’

So they turned to technology, harnessing the power of cross-departmental collaboration to create the School’s first digital opera. And the results surpassed all expectations.

The production involved more than 100 artists from the Opera, Production Arts, Vocal and Music departments, plus Guildhall Live Events – a new department set up to link the professional creative industries with the School.

Cast and chorus filmed their parts from home, while staff and students from the Production Arts department used high tech 3D modelling to recreate the Silk Street Theatre where the performance was due to take place. Behind-the-scenes work such as construction, costume, lighting, props, scenic art, and sound and video production were translated to the digital world.

Wheeler says with students from 14 different countries, juggling time zones became something of a challenge, not to mention lags on internet connections making real-time music performance almost impossible. But the students rose to the occasion.

‘While there were certainly moments when it was hard, and sometimes tears, there was no moment where students ever felt they didn’t want to make this work – they were determined to see it come to fruition. And the results were better than we could have imagined. When we shared it among friends and colleagues, they were blown away, and we decided to stream the production for free via our website to the public.’

The film of the performance is no longer available to watch, but you can get a feeling for how it looked, in the trailer:

Some parts of our Centre are still closed due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t explore the surrounding estate. Few people know their way round better than our assistant curator in architecture and design, Jon Astbury, who’s here with some of his favourite facts and photos to inspire your visit.

Was the Barbican deliberately designed to be hard to navigate?
Not quite. The Barbican’s nature as an elevated island is due in part to the scrapped Pedways scheme, an initiative that once planned to cover the entire City with an incredible network of raised walkways for the Barbican to plug into. With the Barbican’s empty site this was easy to create, but it proved too difficult to retrofit existing buildings with Pedway connections.

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, the architects who designed the Barbican, claimed to be designing not just buildings but an entire neighbourhood, with a multitude of entrances and exits. If you have a thorough explore of the estate, you’ll discover plenty of routes through, inside and out.

Many of these routes have been changed over the years. The entrance to the Art Gallery was once via the Highwalk, and the main entrance to the Centre was via the Lakeside. These were later reconfigured – while you can still access the centre via the Lakeside, a new main entrance was created on Silk Street to make it far more accessible.

Was the Barbican conservatory really built to hide the Theatre fly tower?
Yes - one of the main drivers for the Conservatory’s location was to conceal the concrete stump of the fly tower used by the Theatre below, which was considered to be unattractive for the residents in the neighbouring Cromwell tower. In early plans, this conservatory space was envisioned inside a giant glass pyramid on the lake.

How was there such a large site in the middle of the City on which to build the Barbican Estate?
Projects at the scale of the Barbican in such a central location happen so rarely for the simple reason of space. Some more extreme Modern architects thought this space should be created by wiping away old cities - the Swiss Architect Le Corbusier, for example, had plans to entirely rebuild Paris. But for the City and the Barbican’s site, the Blitz had already wiped away most of the area once home to London’s cloth trade.

So extensive was the destruction that by 1951 just 48 people were registered as living in the Cripplegate Ward.

New perspectives

This moon shot was captured by Björgvin Sigurðarson (@bjorgvinsigur), one of our Instagrammers in Residence. They found themselves early for a theatre rehearsal at the Barbican and went for a twilight walk around to look at the buildings. ‘I noticed the moon was split in half, and as I walked past this building the sharp corner seemed to connect with the moon in shape and shadow,’ says Sigurðarson. ‘So I took a few photographs. With this one, a bird flew by just at the right time, adding the final element.’

Support the Barbican

We rely on ticket sales and your enduring support and generosity to be able to present and share our programme with you and thousands of others. We’re all finding ourselves in completely new territory, which presents a real financial challenge for us and for those we work with. So, if you’re able, please consider donating to us so we can keep investing in the artists and organisations that help make this place what it is. Please also consider donating to our artistic residents and associates to support them through these difficult times.

What's On

We're starting to reopen following government guidance, and can't wait to welcome you back. Your safety is of the utmost importance, so not all types of events are taking place, but you can see what's coming up later in the year on our website.

With thanks

The City of London Corporation, founder and principal funder

Centre Partner
Christie Digital

Major Supporters
Arts Council England; Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation; Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement; The National Lottery Heritage Fund; Terra Foundation for American Art; UBS; Wellcome

Corporate Supporters
Aberdeen Standard Investments; Allford Hall Monaghan Morris; Audible; Bank of America; Bloomberg; Calvin Klein; CMS; DLA Piper; Howden M&A Limited; Leigh Day; Linklaters LLP; National Australia Bank; Natrium Capital Limited; Newgate Communications; Pinsent Masons; Slaughter and May; Sotheby's; Taittinger Champagne; tp bennett; UBS

Trusts & Foundations
The 29th May 1961 Charitable Trust; The John S Cohen Foundation; SHM Foundation; Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from the Art Fund; Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

We also want to thank Barbican Patrons, donors to Name a Seat, Members, and everyone who has supported the Barbican by making a donation.

To find out more, visit barbican.org.uk/supportus or email [email protected]

The Barbican Centre Trust, registered charity no. 294282