A one-bedroom flat in Cromwell Tower is under offer having been reduced to £895,000 late last year. Through Nicola Lee Ltd.
(Picture: Rightmove)The price of a flat in the Barbican Estate, the Brutalist concrete jungle of around 2,000 homes in the City of London, has breached the £1 million mark for the first time.
According to exclusive data by Savills the average sale price of properties in the 1960s landmark hit £1.016 million during 2021, up from an average of £905,000 in 2019. This represents a jump of 12 per cent.
Ten years ago, you would have paid just over £550,000 to live in EC2Y, while back in 2001 you could have picked up a home for less than £260,000.
Jack Downes, head of sales at Hamptons, said that the pandemic has been a real game of two halves for the Barbican. In its first year a glut of properties and a lack of buyers meant the market flatlined. “But since the easing of Covid-19 restrictions there has been a really big surge of pent up demand,” he said. “We are the busiest we have been in five or six years.”
The stereotypical Barbican resident is an architect or creative who loves its mid-century style. But Downes said many current buyers are people who fled London during the pandemic and are now suffering from a case of buyers’ remorse.
“There is a big demand from people looking to buy a pied-a-terre,” he said. “Those that did migrate out to the country or the coast now want a place back in the city. Some did not expect to be called back to their desks, others just miss London.”
Demand is so strong that Downes said around half of the homes he has sold during 2022 have attracted multiple offers and gone to best and final offers with buyers forced to pay on or over asking price to secure a deal.
The Barbican’s first residents moved in in 1969, and early onlookers were generally unimpressed by its labyrinth of concrete walkways, elevated gardens, and high rise towers, all built on a former bomb site on the fringes to provide homes for City Workers.
But appreciation for its Brutalist design, its light and generously-sized flats, and its high quality specification has grown over the years. In 2001 it was give Grade II listed status.
And 2022 is looking like a landmark year for the estate.
The Barbican Centre celebrates its 40th anniversary this month. And in April the City of London Corporation will reveal the winner of an architectural competition to design a £150 million overhaul of the centre. Some of the world’s leading firms, from Adjaye Associates and Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios are on its shortlist.
The Barbican’s design brief called for a modernisation centre so that it “continues to meet the needs of 21st-century artists, audiences, and communities”.
In December the Barbican’s other cultural landmark, the Museum of London, is closing down and moving to West Smithfield. There are plans to redevelop the site, which also includes Bastion House, the 1970s office block raised on stilts above the museum.
The Corporation of London wants the redeveloped site to reveal the ancient Roman wall which once encircled Londinium.
Its plans include three new low energy office buildings, which will help fund the new Museum of London building, plus a landscaped central plaza and easy-to-navigate pedestrian routes in place of the “dark and unwelcoming” space currently around the museum.
A planning application is expected later this year.
