Mick Hartley

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Ancient and Modern

Just a hundred yards apart, to the south of Highgate Cemetery:

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Not all that ancient, in fact: at the top is Holly Village, Baroness Burdett-Coutts' extraordinary Victorian Gothic estate, from 1865. 

Below is Stoneleigh Terrace, on Raydon Street. A Seventies construction, it's one of those concrete municipal efforts that, like the Barbican or the Brunswick Centre near Russell Square, for years looked grim and forbidding and brutal and horrible and everything that people hated about modern architecture, and now, at 30 years old and with the inevitable swing in taste and the passage of time, is looking – to me at any rate – rather fine.

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5 responses to “Ancient and Modern”

  1. Richard Avatar
    Richard

    The Barbican is a fucking calamity. It should be raised.

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  2. Alvin Lucier Avatar
    Alvin Lucier

    The Barbican is very popular with the people who live there, like me. It’s the best designed flat I’ve ever lived in, it’s quiet, it has private garden and a ‘lake’ and it’s a 4 minute walk to the local theatre and cinema.

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  3. DaninVan Avatar
    DaninVan

    Stoneleigh Terrace appears to allow a lot of light and air into each unit; the Barbican, from examining the photos at the link, seems dark and foreboding.
    Those massive overhangs are often used in hot climates to offer relief from solar gain, but in Britain?!

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  4. Alvin Lucier Avatar
    Alvin Lucier

    The flats aren’t dark at all, and those photographs are a particularly bad set, seemly taken to make the place look austere and imposing I’m not claiming it is an English country village, but for living in the city – well I’ll choose the Barbican over every Georgian London row house or Glasgow tenement I have ever lived in.

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  5. John Meredith Avatar
    John Meredith

    Barbican flats are very poipular but I think there is a lot of snobbery involved there. They are tiny, on the whole, and extremely resistant to adaptation. The designers did not seem to anticipate much technological advance in the coming decades or, perghaps more likely, they did not themselves ever clean or cook. Fine if you don’t mind being bossed about by your house. The lower ones are often very public too and, of course, the public areas are notoriously difficult to navigate. They are also very low in density compared to alternative kinds of housing (like those Georgian terraces) and they cast a long shadow on the area around. These ones look much friendlier and I quite like Brunswick too, although, again, they are not exactly user-friendly, whic is odd given the rehtoric that surrsounded their construction.

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