On 3 March 1982, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Barbican Centre and called it “one of the wonders of the modern world.” The remark was generous – the building had taken twenty-two years to complete, cost £161 million (roughly £574 million today), and had already been voted London’s ugliest building in a 2003 poll. The Queen was describing a concrete fortress on a 35-acre site levelled by Luftwaffe bombing on 29 December 1940, where the Cripplegate ward’s population fell from 14,000 to 48 in a single night. What rose from those ruins was not a memorial but a proposition: that brutalism could deliver beauty, community and cultural ambition in a single, uncompromising gesture.
Forty-four years on, the Barbican faces a different kind of reckoning, as we explored in our recent analysis of the Centre’s renewal era. In March 2026, the City of London Corporation approved planning permission for the Barbican Renewal Programme, a £231 million transformation of the Centre’s public spaces, with £191 million committed by the Corporation itself. The project, led by Allies and Morrison alongside Asif Khan Studio, will restore the brutalist foyers, repave the Lakeside terrace, and make the Barbican Conservatory fully accessible for the first time. Construction is due to begin in 2027, with most programmes pausing between June 2028 and June 2029 for the most intensive phase of works. The first phase is targeted for completion in 2030, ahead of the Centre’s fiftieth anniversary.
But the renewal is not merely a matter of fixing leaking pavers and upgrading lifts. It arrives alongside a period of institutional upheaval that has exposed fault lines in the Barbican’s organisational culture – fault lines that complicate any straightforward narrative of restoration.
The Architecture of Conviction
The Barbican Estate was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon – Peter Chamberlin, Geoffrey Powell and Christoph Bon – architects who had already made their reputation with the nearby Golden Lane Estate. Their plan was radical: a self-contained urban quarter raised on a podium, with elevated walkways separating pedestrians from traffic, an artificial lake at its centre, and a conservatory built to conceal the theatre’s fly tower. The residential estate comprises three 42-storey towers – Cromwell, Lauderdale and Shakespeare – alongside fourteen terrace blocks, providing over 2,000 flats for roughly 4,000 residents.
The architects drew inspiration from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and from Italian urbanism, but their material choices were distinctly local. The concrete finish, achieved by hand-drilling with pneumatic jacks for seventeen years, gives the surfaces a rough, textured quality intended to evoke aged stonework. Initial plans to clad the entire structure in white marble were rejected by the City of London on cost grounds – and, practically, because concrete expands and contracts with heat, meaning marble cladding would likely have detached over time. The result is a building that wears its construction method openly, a core tenet of brutalist philosophy: the French béton brut, raw concrete, from which the movement takes its name.
The Barbican was Grade II listed in September 2001, when arts minister Tessa Blackstone designated the complex a site of special architectural interest for its scale, cohesion and ambition – a recognition explored in depth in our Architecture coverage. The listing recognised what residents and regular visitors had long understood: that the Barbican’s labyrinthine walkways, its interplay of light and shadow across bush-hammered concrete, its surprising pockets of greenery and water, constitute one of the most coherent and ambitious experiments in post-war urban living in Britain.
The Numbers Behind the Renewal
The approved renewal scheme does not add a single square metre to the existing site. Instead, it focuses on access, sustainability and more dynamic use of space. The City Corporation’s £191 million represents approximately 80 per cent of the full five-year budget, with the remaining funds to be raised through philanthropic and partnership support. A retrofit-first approach will reuse materials – including Conservatory glass and paving – to reduce carbon emissions, reflecting the project’s commitment to sustainable conservation within a Grade II listed framework.
The approved plans include a second lift in the main foyer to improve accessibility to the Concert Hall and Theatre, a new multi-faith room, increased bathroom provision, and step-free access throughout. The Conservatory, which opened in 1984 and is the second largest in London after Kew Gardens – home to over 1,500 species of plants and trees, two fish ponds with koi and carp, a terrapin pool and bee hives – will receive a climate-controlled habitat to ensure plant health and longevity.
The renewal design team – Allies and Morrison, Asif Khan Studio, Buro Happold, Alan Baxter, Charcoalblue, Mima, Harris Bugg Studio and The Planning Lab – represents a formidable concentration of architectural and engineering expertise. But the project is animated by a tension that defines the Barbican itself: how to modernise a Grade II listed building without betraying the uncompromising vision that earned it protection in the first place.
Philippa Simpson, the Barbican’s director of buildings and renewal, has described the Centre as “a beacon of an optimistic future” in the wake of the Second World War. “This project is rooted in the vision and ambition of its founders,” she told BBC News in February 2025, “to reimagine what an arts centre can be in the 21st Century, a vital, creative space for everyone.”
An Institution in Transition
The renewal programme has unfolded against a backdrop of leadership turbulence that has tested the Barbican’s institutional credibility. In June 2021, the publication of Barbican Stories – a 252-page dossier compiled by current and former staff from ethnic minority backgrounds, funded by white colleagues in solidarity – presented more than 100 anonymous accounts of alleged racism and discrimination at the Centre. “The Barbican’s working culture is inherently racist,” the collective stated. “It is insidious and incredibly obvious at the same time.”
The allegations prompted an independent investigation by Lewis Silkin LLP, commissioned by the City of London Corporation, which interviewed 35 individuals and examined over 120 allegations. The report, published in November 2021, found “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in the handling of complaints and in managers to deal with or take seriously concerns of racism.” The Barbican’s board chairman, Tom Sleigh, apologised on behalf of the institution.
The fallout was significant. Sir Nicholas Kenyon, who had served as managing director since 2007, stepped down in September 2021. He was succeeded by joint interim managing directors Will Gompertz and Sandeep Dwesar, and in 2022 the role was restructured as chief executive, with Claire Spencer appointed as the Centre’s first CEO. Spencer departed in 2024 after two years, and David Farnsworth served as interim CEO before Abigail Pogson – formerly chief executive of the Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Gateshead – was appointed in January 2026.
Pogson’s arrival coincides with a moment of both ambition and anxiety. In February 2026, the Barbican confirmed that Devyani Saltzman, who had served as Director for Arts and Participation since February 2024, would depart in May 2026. The decision to not replace the role prompted an open letter from approximately 200 cultural figures – including the artist John Akomfrah and designer Jasleen Kaur – calling for transparency about the decision and the institution’s commitment to diversity in leadership. The letter, reported by The Art Newspaper in February 2026, argued that the departure risked undermining the very principles the renewal programme claims to uphold.
The Visitor Paradox
Whatever its internal challenges, the Barbican’s public appeal has never been stronger. In 2024, the Centre welcomed more than 1.54 million visitors – a 17 per cent year-on-year increase – placing it 19th in the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) rankings, up five places from 24th. It is now the most visited cultural destination in the City of London, overtaking St Paul’s Cathedral, and ranks within the top 5 per cent of the country’s 400 leading visitor attractions.
The growth reflects broader trends in cultural engagement and specific programming choices. The 2024–25 season included the Noah Davis exhibition, the Darbar Festival of Indian Classical Music, and the Black British Book Festival. Young Barbican membership grew by 6 per cent to 81,324, and 25 per cent of audiences were first-time bookers.
David Farnsworth, the interim CEO, characterised the growth as evidence of “the vital role of the arts in society.” The figures are striking, but they also raise a question that the renewal programme will need to answer: can a building that has historically struggled with inclusion deliver on its promise to be “a vital, creative space for everyone” – not just in its public programming, but in its organisational culture?
What Renewal Must Mean
The Barbican’s defenders – and there are many, particularly among architects, designers and the Londoners who have come to love its concrete geometry – often speak of the building as though it were a fixed point, a monument to a particular moment in post-war ambition. But buildings are not monuments. They are institutions, staffed by people, shaped by politics, subject to the same pressures of power and representation that animate every other corner of public life.
The £231 million renewal is a necessary investment. The foyers need better lighting. The Lakeside leaks. The Conservatory, that improbable tropical greenhouse perched above a concrete fly tower, deserves to be accessible to all visitors, not just those who can manage the stairs. These are practical problems with practical solutions, and the design team assembled to address them is well qualified to do so.
But renewal must mean more than repair. If the Barbican is to justify its Grade II listed status – and the public funds that sustain it – the transformation must engage honestly with the institutional failures that Barbican Stories documented. The departure of Devyani Saltzman, the open letter from 200 signatories, the pattern of leadership turnover: these are not peripheral concerns. They are central to the question of what the Barbican is for.
The building was conceived as a utopian proposition – a city within a city, where living, learning, culture and community would coexist within a single architectural vision. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon designed the Barbican not as a sculpture to be admired from afar, but as a place to be inhabited, navigated, argued over and loved. The renewal programme offers an opportunity to extend that logic – to create an institution as honest about its internal culture as the building is about its concrete.
The Barbican’s concrete will endure. The question is whether the institution that inhabits it can match the ambition of the architecture.
This article draws on reporting by BBC News, The Art Newspaper, Historic England, the Barbican Centre’s own publications, and the Museums Association.
