1. The Barbican  (Tove K Breitstein / Time Out)
    Tove K Breitstein / Time Out
  2. The Barbican hall (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  3. Barbican stairs (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  4. Barbican theatre's stage (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  5. The Barbican  (Nigel Tradewell / Time Out)
    Nigel Tradewell / Time Out
  6. The Barican's view (Tove K Breitstein / Time Out)
    Tove K Breitstein / Time Out
  7. The Barbican fountains (Andrew Brackenbury / Time Out)
    Andrew Brackenbury / Time Out
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Barbican Centre

Alex Sims
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Time Out says

What is it? 

The Barbican Centre lures fans of serious culture into a labyrinthine arts complex, part of a vast concrete estate that also includes 2,000 highly coveted flats and innumerable concrete walkways. It's a prime example of brutalist architecture, softened a little by time and some rectangular ponds housing friendly resident ducks.

The focus is on world-class arts programming, taking in pretty much every imaginable genre. At the core of the music roster, performing 90 concerts a year, is the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), which revels in the immaculately tuned acoustics of the Barbican's concert hall. The art gallery on the third floor stages exhibitions on design, architecture and pop culture, while on the ground floor, the Curve is a free exhibition space for specially commissioned works and contemporary art. The Royal Shakespeare Company stages its London seasons here, alongside the annual BITE programme (Barbican International Theatre Events), which cherry-picks exciting and eclectic theatre companies from around the globe. There's a similarly international offering of ballet and contemporary dance shows. And there's also a cinema, with a sophisticated programme that puts on regular film festivals based around far-flung countries or undersung directors. 

As if that wasn't enough, the Barbican Centre is also home to three restaurants, a public library, and some practice pianos. This cultural smorgasbord is all funded and managed by the City of London Corporation, which sends some of the finance industry's considerable profits its way. It's been in operation since 1982; its uncompromising brutalist aesthetic and sometimes hard-to-navigate, multi-level structure were initially controversial, but it's getting increasingly popular with architecture fans and Instagrammers alike.

Why go? 

As the UK's leading international arts centre, this is the place to get cultured.

Don’t miss: 

The huge, succulent-filled Barbican conservatory is a must-see on your London bucket list. It’s one of the biggest greenhouses in London, second only to Kew Gardens and houses 2,000 plant species, including towering palms and ferns, across an extensive series of concrete terraces and beds. There are even koi carp and terrapins. The atmosphere is almost post-apocalyptically peaceful. It’s open on Sunday and bank holiday Monday afternoons, as well as selected Saturdays. You can even book in for an afternoon tea among the plants. 

When to visit: 

Mon-Friday 8am11pm, Sat-Sun 9am11pm

Ticketing info: 

Free entry, some events and exhibitions are ticketed. 

Time Out tip: 

If I had a pound for every time I’ve tried and failed to find the entrance to the Barbican Centre among its maze of concrete walkways… If you don’t want to risk being late for the performance you’re seeing, look up the entrance you need in advance. Trust me. 

Find more culture in London and discover our guide to the very best things to do in London.

Details

Address
Beech Street
Barbican
London
EC2Y 8AE
Transport:
Tube: Barbican; Rail/Tube: Moorgate
Price:
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What’s on

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: ‘It Will End In Tears’

3 out of 5 stars

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has cast you as an extra in a tense, hazy film about alienation, love and murder. She’s built a series of plywood film sets in the Barbican Curve, and filled them with rough, bare paintings, each one detailing a grim, uncomfortable narrative arc. A woman arrives in some generic colonial outpost of wide open, empty landscapes and claustrophobic buildings. The sets recreate the outlines of a house, then a bedroom. In the paintings, awkward looks are exchanged, relationships are strained, washing is hung, a knife is brandished.  Lovers share a cigarette under the sheets, then a body is found on a porch. The final set is a courthouse, the paintings depict only white jurors. All these riffs on film noir, femme fatales and murder mysteries tell a story of otherness, alienation and injustice. The implied narrative is full of anger and violence and jealousy in a colony watched over and controlled by an uncaring dominant culture. The ideas are good, but the execution falls flat. The paintings are a bit shoddy and unfinished, and the sets are plain, dull plywood. It feels rushed, more like a sketch than the final thing, more like a storyboard than a full movie.

‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’

4 out of 5 stars

What do you do when your world is falling apart? When regimes are oppressing, corporations are exploiting, society is crumbling and economies are collapsing? Well, you can fight, you can make art, or you can just live. The Indian artists in the Barbican’s big autumn show do all three. In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address. It’s a dizzyingly varied show. Navjot Altaf’s monochrome images of fists and mobs are angry, punk politicism, while Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of parties and families are tender everyday intimacy. Nalini Malani’s early video work is a subtle, semi-abstract expression of disillusionment and anger, while Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings are desperate critiques of rampant, destructive urbanisation. All these different approaches all still similarly moving stories.  Other works show people trying to live, to get by, in difficult times; the everyday scenes of Gieve Patel’s paintings, the gay men just existing next to landmarks in a country where homosexuality was a punishable offence in Sunil Gupta’s photos. There’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief India was a place in flux, and places in flux need moulding, influencing, like in Sheba Chhachhi’s portraits of female activists. But in all this turbulence, things are lost, and there’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief to a

The Buddha of Suburbia

A director who truly feels at the top of her game right now, Emma Rice’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's classic semi-autobiographical novel about a young Asian man’s outrageous coming-of-age in ’70s suburban London scored ecstatic notices when it premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon recently in a co-production between the RSC and her Wise Children company. Now it's heading our way, the first RSC show to transfer to the Barbican since the pandemic. The casting remains largely as Stratford, with Dee Ahluwalia leading the cast as Kureishi proxy Karim.

  • Drama

Quiet Songs

Although Ruth Negga was due to star in the Young Vic’s Portia Coughlan, the pandemic put paid to that, and as such it’s been well over a decade since the Irish star did a play in London. This is quite the return then, lending her celebrity to this unusual project from writer/director/composer Finn Beames. She will play a young gay person searching to find their identity in the world, in a work where the music is written for string instruments that will be bowed by actual swords.

  • Experimental

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Although it’s provided a steady pipeline of new plays – including the all conquering ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ – the RSC hasn’t transferred a single Shakespeare to London since 2019. The pandemic and the success of ‘Totoro’ can reasonably be blamed for that. But it’s a treat to have it back with the Bard: the Globe is great but its productions are neccessarily somewhat rough and ready; the RSC offers a slicker, bigger budget take on Shakespeare and it’s great to get both. Transferring to the Barbican straight after Emma Rice’s acclaimed ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, Eleanor Rhodes’s production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was praised for its surreal freshness when it debuted in Stratford back in February. Casting for this transfer is TBC.

  • Shakespeare

Raymond Gubbay Christmas Festival

Classical music impresario Raymond Gubbay presents his annual handpicked selection of music for the festive season. Highlights include the Christmas carol singalong (Dec 17), Love Actually with live orchestra (Dec 21), Beethoven's Ninth (Dec 28), the music of Zimmer vs Willimas (Dec 31), and the New Year's Day Proms. All set to take place in the Barbican's lovely hall, these musical picks are a classy, Christmassy way to spend an evening. 

  • Concerts
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