Middle-Class Castle

Abstract

The Barbican Estate, in London’s square-mile City financial district, is one of the capital’s most unique residential spaces. In the 1950s the City Corporation redeveloped the war-damaged site as a “high class” neighborhood even though the prevailing planning dogma was to usher the well-heeled out of the crowded center. To sanitize the inner-city site, the Barbican’s architects created a radically modernist residential precinct elevated above City streets. This social history examines the Barbican Estate as a unique intersection between modern architecture and the emerging discourse of gentrification in London. In creating spaces of comfort and exclusion, its architects drew from the same new middle-class culture that influenced the gentrification of existing London neighborhoods. The Estate’s eventual residents continued this interpretation and revision after the flats opened in 1968. The Barbican demonstrates the flexible nature of early gentrification and suggests how it must be approached as a diversified spatial phenomenon.