Blocks and Towers
The residential estate consists of 13 terrace blocks, grouped around a lake and green squares. The main buildings rise up to seven floors above a podium level, which links all the facilities in the Barbican, providing a pedestrian route above street level. Some maisonettes are built into the podium structure. There is no vehicular access within the estate, but there are some car parks at the periphery of the estate. Public car parks are located within the Barbican Centre.
The estate also contains three of London's tallest residential towers, at 42 storeys and 123 metres (404 ft) high. The top two or three floors of each block comprise three penthouse flats. The towers are (east to west):
- Cromwell Tower, completed in 1973 - named after Thomas Cromwell;
- Shakespeare Tower, completed in 1976 - named after William Shakespeare; and
- Lauderdale Tower, completed in 1974 - named after the Earl of Lauderdale.
Once the tallest residential towers in London, they were surpassed by the Pan Peninsula development near Canary Wharf.
Read more about this topic: Barbican Estate
Famous quotes containing the words blocks and/or towers:
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)