The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
From family house to concrete box
Why Robert Elms and his wife decided to shrink their lives
‘WE WANTED A COMPLETE CHANGE OF STYLE AND SCENERY’
There’s never a right time to move house. It’s always a wrench and a rupture, but this seemed to some like a particularly perverse move to make in the middle of a pandemic.
While many people were fleeing the plague-ridden metropolis, seeking more space, more contact with nature, we decided to forgo our large and lovely five-storey Georgian house on a wide, tree-lined street for a small concrete box in the most unremittingly urban location in all of London.
I’ve always liked a bit of brutalism. Always admired the Barbican for its rigorous architectural purity and utopian 1970s communalism, a mid-century modernist citadel in the ancient City of London. Complete with concert hall, theatres, galleries, conservatory, cinemas, library and restaurants, it’s a kind of concrete holiday camp for the design-conscious. Or as my son said, ‘It’s what the Soviet Union would have been like if it had worked.’
I’d often thought that this would be a great place for my wife and me to spend the next stage of our life; everything you need just an elevator ride away, and St Bart’s Hospital around the corner. But convincing everybody, especially myself, that the time had come to say goodbye to our happy house of 26 years was never going to be easy.
We had lovingly rebuilt that old house in our image, restoring its sash windows and shutters, reconstructing its wrought-iron railings, training its wisteria. We filled it with a lifetime’s worth of accrued memories and mementos. And now we were preparing to leave it all behind, insecure in the knowledge that most of our treasured possessions would not fit into a diminutive new home that’s way less than half the former’s size.
And what’s more, we had to tell our two 20-something kids that the beloved home in which they were both born – and still lived – would no longer be theirs. On top of that, there would only be room for one of them in the new apartment at any one time. Guilt mingled with doubt, compounded by the fact that my baby girl – spending a year abroad as part of her degree – would not even get to say farewell to the only home she’d ever known. Discussions were intense, to say the least.
But despite the occasional wobble, we knew the time had come. The unease and disquiet spread by the virus was perhaps a spur; things that had felt permanent now seemed provisional and, besides, swimming against the tide does have certain advantages. Space of the kind we had to offer was at a premium, while prices had fallen for flats in our chosen quasi-stalinist stalagmite. Apartments, which once rarely came on the market, are now more plentiful as the first generation of Barbicanites, many of whom moved in when it was built, are now coming to the end of their mortal lease.
Releasing some of the equity that had built up in our house and paying off our mortgage was certainly a motivating factor for our move – possibly helping the kids with a place of their own, saving some funds for retirement – but it was about more than money. It was a realisation that this wasn’t just us moving house, this was us moving on.
Downsizing from a big rumbustious family home is tantamount to admitting that you are now officially on the downslope and you’d better organise your life accordingly. I am 62, don’t want to work so hard, don’t like gardening or DIY, don’t want to shout to my wife downstairs or climb five flights to look for my lost spectacles, don’t need any more room for any more stuff. Time to shrink. So we decided to scale down by moving up in the world.
The Barbican estate was constructed on a 35-acre bomb site. It was designed by arch-modernist architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as an experiment in high-end, high-density urban living for city types to walk from their state-of-the-art apartments to their offices. Their dramatic and uncompromising vision of a raw-concrete, car-free bastion with a warren of walkways and tunnels interspersed with lakes and lawns instantly divided opinion. And it still does.
Most City workers preferred commuting to their mock-tudor Surrey mansions, but there was always a group of people – many of them architects themselves or designers, artists, creatives – who loved both the style of the place and the sense of communality. It is an enclosed world and you have to choose to be there. When we tell friends about our choice, we receive either envy or pity.
There are more than 2,000 Barbican apartments of various kinds, most of them low-rise, all of them beautifully designed, with big windows and communal gardens. But the most iconic and striking part of the estate is its three towers; jagged grey concrete giants. These were the tallest residential blocks in Europe when they were completed in 1976. And I had my heart set on one of those, the higher the better.
This was partly to get as far away as possible from a Georgian terrace in Camden Town, without straying far from the centre of town. We could have bought a swanky house in the outskirts, but I have a dread of returning to the suburbia I grew up in; no desire to go gently into that distant postcode. We wanted a complete change of style and scenery rather than a reduced version of what we had before.
The amount of grief involved in moving had to be worth it, and I don’t just mean financially. We needed exciting, novel experiences to get us out of our urban comfort zone. This had to be a clean break and a big adventure. Plus, I wanted a view. I am a proud Londoner and the idea of being able to see my city arrayed before me was a big part of the appeal.
So we looked at half a dozen tower apartments and put an offer on a 21st-floor flat, which needed a little modernising – only to see that fall through as our buyer pulled out.
For a few weeks, it seemed as if we might not move after all, but our disappointment confirmed to us that we were now psychologically ready to go. Then we found new buyers for our house, and at the same time viewed and put an offer on a chronically run-down but wonderfully aligned flat on the Barbican’s 34th floor. When I spied the Thames, the London Eye and Wren’s majestic dome from the balcony, I knew we’d found the one. I also knew it would be many months and many more pounds spent before we could move in, as it required complete renovation. The adventure was back on.
Packing up our house with its avalanche of stuff was overwhelming and chastening. I felt embarrassed by the amount of boxes we filled. As much as possible went to charity shops or was donated to friends and family. Sofas, tables, lights and mirrors were flogged to our buyers, who clearly liked our style. Books were the biggest problem, beloved
tomes never to be read again. We face a huge monthly bill for storage for stuff, most of which will not fit into our flat when we finally move in. A reckoning delayed.
But there was a surprising upside to seeing our living room looking like a shabby distribution centre. It’s hard to get romantic about bare walls and denuded bookshelves, rolls of bubble wrap and piles of boxes. Suddenly the house we’d lived in for more than a quarter of a century was no longer our home, and saying goodbye when the fleet of removal trucks arrived was not the emotional trauma I’d expected. Our lovely home had left us before we left it.
Squeezing ourselves, our suitcases and our goldfish into a pleasant but tiny rented flat was more of a shock to the system. This is to be our crowded house for the six months we’ve allotted to get the work done. But it does mean that the 34th-floor flat will feel positively spacious when we finally move in.
That deadline could be tight, as we have to completely redo everything, including the fiendishly complex plumbing and electrics, take down the asbestos-coated ceiling, shift a few internal walls and totally modernise the iconic but exhausted bathrooms and kitchen. All the while respecting the fact that this is a listed building and we have to work within the strictures imposed by the City of London Corporation.
All exterior features, from doors and windows to concrete walkways, are sacrosanct; the basic layout of the flat, with its row of small, windowless internal bathrooms and kitchen, cannot be altered; and there are strict controls on noise, working hours and use of lifts. The wait for permissions was frustrating, but finally we got the go-ahead to rip it up and start again.
Witnessing the flat we’d just bought reduced to rubble was a bit scary, but because it is basically a selfsupporting concrete box, walls came tumbling down, revealing the complex wiring pattern, the baffling plumbing and clever underfloor heating. This place was brilliantly designed but set up for the 1970s, so there is little room for large modern beds, insufficient power points and limited storage. We want to preserve the spirit of the apartment but make it fit for this century.
The responsibility for that transformation falls upon my wife, Christina, who has a degree in architecture, a career in style and
We want to preserve the spirit of the apartment but make it fit for this century
an unswerving eye for design, and Wojciech, our charming contractor, experienced in the weird ways of the Barbican, but new to such a major project.
We’ve done up properties before, we’re not scared of a big job, but the torrent of decisions to be made in one go is overwhelming. Hours spent discussing taps, sinks and countertops, flooring and paint finishes, comparing prices and seeking bargains. Of course you always like the most expensive option, but we can’t let this project skint us.
There’s also a certain tension between the desire to preserve original features – which were all there in our flat, but in terrible condition – and the need for comfort; between my desire for a swish James Bond-style pad and my wife’s earthier, more organic tastes. If this is to be our final and forever home, we need to get all the balances right.
And we need to believe that this has been the right decision. Of course you have doubts, especially when your daughter arrives home from South America with bags that will barely even fit through the door of your rented abode and starts to weep for her lost youth. I’ve been missing my large jazz vinyl collection and I’m still trying to work out how that will fit into the new place. But up until now I’ve not missed the old house at all. I miss proximity to the park, the Portuguese geezers in our old corner shop and a natter with Mick the Fish next door.
One of the appeals of the Barbican is the heightened sense of community, compared to an average London neighbourhood. Everybody you meet in the lifts or the lobbies welcomes you, gives you tips on how to find your way around, then invites you to join this committee or that club.
Many questions remain, mainly about storage, but also the thorny subject of whether we keep a car in our new inner-city gaff, given that a parking spot adds even more to the already stonking service charge. What sort of lighting do we choose, do we need blinds if no one can see in, and can we afford one of those super-duper Japanese bidet loos? But the question of whether we’ve done the right thing was answered when we first saw the view at night.
We’ve yet to spend an entire night or even a day in our new home, but we went up to our building site one evening as dusk fell and watched the magical transformation of the cityscape. As the lights came on over London town, a glamorous, cinematic panorama was revealed, like Blade Runner with a river running through it. We could see all those famous sites, see the story of our multilayered city lit up so wonderfully, but we could also see our future arrayed before us. It was a thrilling vision indeed.