Barbican and City of London (6 pages)
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And so to The City. The Square Mile. The money factory sucking in and spitting out 300,000 folk a day. And in the middle of it the Barbican, the biggest housing project in Europe built on a huge bomb-site cleared by the Lufftwaffe on December 29th 1941, a Sunday chosen to give the incendiaries a chance to gain hold before office and wharehouse keys could be found.
Loved and loathed, it is an oasis of sorts in the never-ending whirr of the global city. Intricate and baffling, built on a promise of raised streets that never came it rises up from the ashes of old Grubb Street, Cripplegate Within, Shakespeare's gaff, the guilds and galiots, the worshipful companies, and now stands astride the mighty Crossrail, eviscerated and shored up, the tracks running on rubber sleepers to let the sleepers sleep above.
Repeating and repetitive and never quite the same, the light constantly shifting, infuriating in its precision, over-defined and unyielding to the creative eye, to the guy who paints corners by cutting corners.
