On the great arts centre that Shoreditch residents discuss and rarely visit, and what this tells us about the geography of cultural engagement
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Harper-Thames on London culture and the gap between intention and action.
The Barbican Centre is twenty minutes from my flat by bike, twelve by Uber, and I have been there four times in three years, which is not enough given how much I think about going. I have a list of things I intend to see there that is longer than the list of things I have seen there, which is the defining characteristic of my relationship with cultural London: an aspiration to engagement that is consistently outpaced by the demands of the actual week. I am writing this partly as an account of a problem and partly as a commitment to do something about it, which I recognise is not the same as doing something about it.
What the Barbican Is
The Barbican is an arts centre of genuine and unusual quality — concert hall, cinema, theatres, gallery, library, restaurants — housed in a residential Brutalist complex that is either magnificent or oppressive depending on your relationship to 1970s concrete, and which I find magnificent, though I acknowledge this is a minority position. It sits in an area of the City that feels quite different from Shoreditch, calmer and more ordered, and the contrast between the two neighbourhoods is itself interesting: the difference between the East London that is being remade constantly and the City that has been remade over centuries and has arrived at a kind of expensive solidity.
The Problem of Proximity
The problem with cultural institutions that are close to you is that their proximity removes the urgency that distance creates. If the Barbican were in Hammersmith, I would have planned a trip and booked tickets and organised an evening around the journey. Because it is twenty minutes away, it is always available in principle and therefore always deferrable in practice. The ticket I have not bought does not feel like a missed opportunity; it feels like an option I am keeping open. The option stays open. The performance happens without me. This is the trap of living in a city with too much to do: proximity breeds deferral.
The Four Times I Went
The four times I went, I was glad I went. This is the data I keep ignoring. Once for a concert that was extraordinary. Once for an exhibition that I thought about for a week afterward. Once for a film that I would have watched on my phone and instead saw on a proper screen with proper sound, which is not the same experience. Once for a meal in the restaurant before a concert I ended up not attending, which still counts because the meal was excellent and I walked around the lake afterward in the October dark and the complex looked like a city in a science fiction film. All four times: glad I went. Zero times: wish I had stayed home. The data is clear.
The Commitment
I am going to go to the Barbican this month. I am putting this in print because I am aware that my internal commitments to cultural engagement have a poor conversion rate and that public accountability is a more reliable mechanism. If you are reading this and you also live nearby and also have the list and also have not been recently, this is an invitation to go at the same time, to different things, and to report back to each other on what we saw. The city has things in it that are worth seeing. The Barbican has several of them. Twenty minutes is not far.
For more from Harper-Thames on London culture, visit Harper-Thames. More at the Barbican Centre.
My commitment to the Barbican stands, and I am adding a specific one: the next concert I am told about and think I might like, I am going to book within forty-eight hours of hearing about it, because forty-eight hours is the window in which the intention is still hot and the deferral has not yet set in. Beyond forty-eight hours, the concert joins the list. Within forty-eight hours, it becomes a plan. This is a system I am inventing right now for the purpose of this piece and I am genuinely going to try it, and I report this not because the system is interesting but because the accountability of reporting it may be what makes it work, which is a perfectly legitimate use of a piece of writing about a members club and a cultural institution.
The Barbican, while I am thinking about it, has one feature that I do not mention enough: the conservatory, which is on the third floor and contains an extraordinary collection of tropical plants in a space that feels genuinely unlikely given what surrounds it. It is not always open, but when it is, it is one of the stranger and more beautiful rooms in London, and it costs nothing to enter. If your timing is right and you find yourself in the Barbican on a Sunday afternoon with an hour to spare, go and find the conservatory. You will not regret it.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
