Report - 3 Towers of Barbican, London, Jun-Sep 2011

kevin arnold · Sep 28, 2011

Visited with Smalls and Za Gringo

Let me start by saying that I'm a huge fan of the Barbican Estate. I can't even begin to name all the things that I like about it. It's enough to say that if I could choose one place in London to live in, it would definitely be here. Obviously I will never be able to afford it, so it was great to enjoy some of these views free of charge even if only for a few nights.

Lauderdale, Cromwell and Shakespeare towers have always been somewhere on the list of places to check but they've never been high-priority. I knew some base jumpers had done it (there should still be Downfallen's report on here) but I always assumed it involved tailgating residents into the building which is not quite my cup of tea. So I never really bothered checking any of them properly. Until one day I saw Lauderdale pictures on Gary's flickr. I thought him and Patch wouldn't have been bothered with tailgating, so I went to look for whatever access they used. Lauderdale got done, we cracked Cromwell soon after that, then got stuck at Shakespeare tower for a while. Recently that got ticked off as well, so it's time for a summary report I suppose.

There's a few things that I particularly enjoyed about exploring those three towers (apart from great views over my favourite estate). Firstly it was the whole, erm.. place hacking side of things. Usually high stuff involves simply jumping over the hoarding and heading for an open building, keeping an eye on PIRs, CCTV etc. With those towers it was different, you had to use your head to get in and then again to get onto the roof. And then even if you get one tower done you have to start from scratch with the next one as the access is different in each case (even though the towers seem identical).

Then the fact that if you do it right, you can visit those places during the day as well. I got some nice dawn shots from Cromwell and I saw Gary's sunset pics from Lauderdale. Lovely.

Then the cheekiness of sneaking into the ivory towers where the other half lives. They think they're well protected but there's people walking on the glass roofs of their penthouses.

Anyway, pictures time. As I said, getting in seems a bit tricky at first, then you're in and you start to think it's going to be easy from there...

Then there's locked doors, iron bars, squeezing hands through gaps, using hatches to get to lift rooms and all other activities that make those towers interesting.