Monday 28th Oct.
14.00
Barbican Tube Station
In spite of its apparent radicalism, The Barbican as an assortment of parts appears almost as a remonstration with progress. A key site of 1960’s cultural politics whose defence of the future was played out almost comically around the defunct defences of the past. And within its dour yet prismic nature it ascribes to its time an expression of time.
This walk will explore how within the evenness of tempo and texture, The Barbican sought to entertain the past as guide and indicator to the articulation of the future, where notions of what it is to look to the future and to be of the future are reduced to a question of phrasing; and how in the improbability of its parts the staged nature of the authentic contrives to aid the assimilation of the dream.
Almost as a grey day in Disneyland it constitutes a very un-European of European Grands Projets.
The Cripplegate area in 1950 awaiting redevelopment, with St. Giles Cripplegate and in front of it a barbican dating to the Roman period
Aerial view of The Barbican complex with Aldersgate Street to the right and the church now sat to the south of the lake
The public spaces, defined by the lake and the gardens at Ninfa, an example of the British fascination for the Italian garden’s sense of the sublime
What came after – Sir Terry Farrell, London Wall and Alfred Kubin, German late 19th C artist and illustrator
Simon saw
the others were 
while Patiya assembled her mosaic
Simon’s eye was caught by