If you want to annoy someone who lives in the Barbican estate, simply say, ‘But isn’t the Barbican a council estate?’ They will assure you it isn’t – in tones of rising horror. But they are often a bit hazy about why it isn’t.
The true answer, if you’re interested, is that, yes, it is owned by a council but, no, it’s not a council estate. Let me explain.
The City of London is a ‘council’ (another name for it is a ‘local authority’), just like the London Borough of Islington or the City of Wolverhampton.
The City of London built the Barbican estate in the 1970s and 1980s. But they didn’t build it for council tenants. They built it for stockbrokers, accountants, bankers, and city workers – office workers, that is, not nurses, street sweepers, or shop assistants. For those, they had built the Golden Lane estate.
The City sunk considerable amounts of money into the construction of the Barbican, as well as enough concrete to build several Channel tunnels. Their ostensible motive was to make money.
The flats were all designed to be let at high commercial rents, and nearly all of them were let that way as soon as each building was finished. Not in their wildest dreams, were the City dignitaries thinking of selling the flats.
But then Margaret Thatcher arrived with her ‘Right To Buy’ scheme to allow council tenants to buy their flats at a discount. The City suddenly found itself in the position of having to allow its residents – the stockbrokers, accountants, and bankers to whom it had let these flats – to buy their flats at the same percentage discount at which the hard-working council tenants of any other council were being allowed to buy their flats. After a while, the City decided to go with the flow, and even sold, rather than reletting, vacant flats which came into their hands when tenancies came to an end. And, so, now nearly every flat in the Barbican estate has been purchased on a long lease, like flats in South Kensington and Notting Hill. But the stigma that the flats must once have been council flats remains.
Personally, I think that anyone who managed to buy their Barbican flat at a hefty discount should be prepared to endure the slight discomfort of being thought of as a former council tenant. It’s a small price to pay – and not as small as the price many of them paid for their flats.
I mentioned profit as the ‘ostensible reason’ for the City of London deciding to build the Barbican estate. In fact, the more pressing reason was a political one. There were rumblings in the 1970s about the fact that the City didn’t have many residents. The residents were mainly caretakers of office blocks. Politicians didn’t think it was right for the City of London to remain as a separate local authority when it didn’t have any voters, merely visitors who went and lived elsewhere every night and at weekends. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, the City set about trying to create a voter base. The Barbican estate provided it. They suddenly had several thousand new voters. These voters were not just useful to the City by existing. They have turned out to be highly vociferous and effective pressure group. They even managed to get the Crossrail route changed to avoid having tunnelling going on under their buildings.
