Peter Duckworth talks with Barbican Archivist Tom Overton about the Barbican Archive’s success on Google Arts & Culture and how it came to be shared with the world.
Organisations’ Archives are, by nature, often dull and boring collections of papers and ephemera, of interest to a few academics and historians. But not the Barbican Archive. The Barbican always does things differently and so it is with its Archive. By working with the non-commercial Google Arts & Culture app the Barbican Archive has been transformed into a living, breathing thing; alive with narratives of the past and threads which connect everything to the present. If you haven’t yet explored the Barbican Archive on Google Arts & Culture you are in for a treat. On the Google Arts & Culture app, exploring “Losing Yourself in the Barbican” is an experience not unlike exploring the actual Barbican itself: you fall down rabbit holes of interesting stories and collections, you find new adventures each time you explore, and you often get lost finding your way back to where you started. It is, quite frankly, a brilliant piece of archive engineering, making a rather staid collection of paper and photos alive and engaging.
I met with Tom Overton, Barbican Archivist, to find out the fascinating story of the archive and how we got to where we are today.
Let’s wind back. The story goes that when Chamberlin, Powell & Bon closed their architects practice in 1986, Geoffery Powell offered the papers, plans and drawings to both RIBA and the City of London. Neither took up the offer and, as rumour has it, he put the whole lot in a skip. Which, quite frankly, is extraordinary, although attitudes towards keeping old things for archival purposes have changed over the years — we only have to look at all the lost programmes from the 1960s and 1970s BBC to know that.
Thankfully a bunch of inspired residents, modestly known as the ‘Residents’ Plans Group’, saved a wealth of undocumented drawings and plans that were discovered on-site, presumably left behind by various contractors.
In 2016 Tom, and his colleague Matthew Harle, were asked by the Barbican Centre and the Guildhall School to pull together a comprehensive Barbican archive, in preparation for the 40th anniversary of the Barbican Centre and the 50th anniversary of the Estate. However, there was a problem. The plans were stored in a room next to one of the car parks, near a Garchey waste disposal unit, in a room prone to flooding and dampness, and frequented by the odd rat or two. An archivist’s worst nightmare. And secondly, upon investigation, there was little else in the archive other than these plans and drawings. And whilst plans and drawings are of architectural archival interest, they don’t resonate much beyond that specialist interest.
Tom & Matt needed more. With tenacious investigation and digging, they got more. They sourced the complete Peter Bloomfield Barbican photographic archive, which documents the final four years of the building of the Barbican Centre. Through Libby Rice, who now manages the LSO archive, they received collections of Barbican material: papers that Libby had strived to save from destruction some years earlier and had done so at the eleventh hour, literally as the builders moved in to where this archive was stored. From the Barbican Estate Office they obtained City of London sales brochures for the Houses and Towers. The complete archive of the graphic design of the original Barbican Centre was donated by the widow of Ken Briggs, the graphic designer himself. And other jewels emerged as they dug deeper into the history of the Estate and the Centre.
The key moment in driving this from a nice-to-have archive to something resonating on a global scale, was when Google Arts & Culture got on board in 2019. Google Arts & Culture is a non-commercial organisation who digitally document artworks and exhibitions of hundreds of Galleries throughout the world. The Barbican Art Gallery had been working with them, which opened up conversations about the archive. The potential for these irreplaceable drawings and plans to be simply lost to deterioration ticked boxes for Google. And with Google then committed to the project, this enabled Tom, Matt and a new member of the team, Annie Ward, to convince the Barbican Centre to relocate the plans to safety, in the rooms above cinemas 2 and 3. And so began the seemingly endless task for technician, Emma Campbell, to digitise many thousands of architectural drawings and images using an industrial-sized scanner lent to the team by Google.
Tom, Matt & Annie tackled how to present the archive to the world in such a way that would bring it alive and make it engaging to anyone with a passing interest in the Barbican. They recognised that the most interesting and engaging collections on Google Arts & Culture are not the museums with endless digitised artwork, but the museums that use their collections to build stories around content. The Archive team did a wonderful job using what is a limited and recent archive by many standards, to come up with over sixty stories telling the tales of the Barbican Estate and the Barbican Centre, from the very beginning. Narratives such as “The Battle of the Barbican”, “Barbican Blunder? The Barbican in the Media”, “Inside a Barbican Engineers Scrapbook” and “Finding a Way Into The Barbican”, to name but a few. On the app the stories are cleverly nested within other related stories, meaning that you can get wonderfully lost through a labyrinth of twists and turns.
What Tom and the team have done with The Barbican Archive on Google Arts and Culture is the pinnacle of how to present an archive in an engaging and informative way to the widest possible audience. We are very lucky to have this resource at our fingertips.
Tom also had the wonderful 1950s/60s architects’ model of the Barbican restored which now has pride of place in the Barbican Centre as part of the installation Concrete and Clay, located by the Barbican Shop.
And what of the future? Matt and Annie have moved on, but Tom remains as committed as ever. Prescient that many of the people who worked on the construction of the Barbican are getting on in age, Tom is looking at recording oral stories of their lives and experiences working on the Estate and the Centre. One fascinating oral history already recorded is from Robert Harris, one of the original carpenters, who was involved in the Battle of the Barbican, the strike by the workers in the mid-sixties. This gentleman notably had to help his co-workers with their time sheets, as so many were unable to read or write. These personal oral memories work very well alongside narratives told by the Barbican paper and photographic Archive: they set it against real lives and a wider social history.
So, if you want an indulgent afternoon with stories from the Barbican’s history, fire up the Google Arts & Culture app or simply type into Google: “Losing Yourself in the Barbican” and follow the link to Google Arts & Culture. You’ll have yourself “an adventure through London’s icon of Brutalist architecture.”
Fig 1 The cover of the Speed House sales brochure, published at some time in the mid-1960s. Speed House was the first residential block to be completed and hence had one of the first sales brochures produced. This illustration still shows the original design intention, which was to have a glass pyramid in the lake, designed by Christof Bon, where the half-pipe water feature currently is. This later became the conservatory, built around the theatre fly tower.
Fig 2 An elegant 1970s couple chill on a 70s modular sofa with THAT view!
Fig 3 Before the sales House brochures were produced there was a large 36 page sales brochure produced in the mid 1960s. Here is a page from that with an elegant drawing of the Brooke Marine kitchen, looking somewhat larger than perhaps it does in real life!
Fig 4 The early sales brochures from the first blocks to be opened have fabulous pictures imagining the interiors in a very modernist fashion. These would have been produced in the mid-1960s and this sort of interior would have looked very modern at that time. Britain was way behind Scandinavia and much of Europe in terms of interior trends. This interior design does not look dissimilar to many of the Barbican flats these days after refurbishment. It just took trends in Britain a few decades to catch up with the original Barbican designers!
Fig 5 Here we see a photo of the interior of the Barbican Centre on opening with the fabulous signage and graphics that Ken Briggs designed for the Barbican
Fig 6 A page from one of the three volumes of Ken Brigg’s style guide for the graphics of the Barbican Centre. Here is a collection of his terrific pictograms.
Fig 7 The beautiful painting/illustration on the cover of the original 36 page promotional booklet for flats at the Barbican. This would have been published before the individual block brochures, so probably in the mid 1960s before the delays in building from industrial action put back the opening dates.
Fig 8 The March 1983 cover of the monthly guide to what is on at the Barbican, with a birthday celebratory image.
Fig 9 The first tranche of Houses open for renting had brochures designed in early 1968 and were more lavishly illustrated than those for later phases. The cover of the Andrewes House brochure (from 1969) is particularly intriguing: the illustration suggests that when this was drawn, the idea of the lake being terminated with the glass pyramid, as seen on the 1968 Speed House brochure, had been dropped, but the concrete island that eventually replaced it had not yet been designed. The result is that the garden is extended so wide that the lake is a mere channel next to Andrewes. Was this being considered by the architects? Or did they simply tell the artist that they hadn’t yet worked out what to put instead of the glass pyramid so he should just extend the garden? Very intriguing.
Fig 10 An important architectural plan. It is this rooftop plan that the original Residents’ Plans Group used to identify the phases of the building, and to then be able to allocate all the hundreds of drawings to the right phase of the building works. This is one of the only plans that clearly showed each section of the Barbican Estate and to which phase the building works would be allocated. THese are the large numbers from 1 to 5 on the drawing.
