What is Lauderdale Tower?
Lauderdale Tower is the westernmost of the three residential towers on the Barbican Estate in the City of London, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon with Ove Arup and Partners as engineers and completed in October 1974. It stands 123 metres (404 feet) tall over 44 storeys — 42 of them above ground — and contains 114 flats plus three penthouse maisonettes, three flats to a floor, each with its living room in one of the three prows of the triangular plan.
With its siblings Cromwell Tower (1973) and Shakespeare Tower (1976), it forms the vertical element of a forty-acre estate built on bombed-out Cripplegate between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s: around 2,000 flats in long terrace blocks and towers, raised on a podium above gardens, a lake and the Barbican Centre. The estate was listed Grade II in 2001; the towers are not listed separately but as part of that single entry.
Facts panel
- Location: Barbican Estate, City of London EC2Y; street entrance from Beech Street via Lauderdale Place
- Architects: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon
- Engineers: Ove Arup and Partners
- Client: Corporation of the City of London
- Estate designed: 1955–59; approved December 1959
- Lauderdale Tower completed: October 1974
- Contractors: Turriff Ltd, completed by John Laing Construction
- Height: 123 m (404 ft)
- Storeys: 44, including garage level and street foyer; 42 above ground
- Flats: 114, plus 3 penthouse maisonettes
- Plan: triangular; three flats per floor; three lifts around a central well
- Structure: reinforced concrete, largely cast in situ; exposed surfaces pick-hammered by hand to expose Pen Lee granite aggregate
- Listed: Grade II, 5 September 2001, as part of the Barbican (Historic England list entry 1352667)
- Name: after the Earls of Lauderdale, whose Lauderdale House stood on Aldersgate Street
Architects: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon
Peter Chamberlin, Geoffry Powell and Christoph Bon formed their partnership in 1952 after Powell won the competition for the Golden Lane Estate, immediately north of the Barbican site. Golden Lane — smaller, more colourful, built 1957–62 — got them the Barbican, and the two estates were deliberately knitted together: the Barbican's YMCA tower (now Blake Tower) was sized to bridge them.
The practice was unusual in postwar Britain for working mainly for a single wealthy client, the City Corporation, on a single site for the best part of thirty years. The Barbican is the result: the most complete architectural ensemble of its era in the country, and the one where Brutalism's ideas about podiums, highwalks and separation of people from traffic were carried through without compromise. Read our guide to Brutalist architecture for the movement the Barbican belongs to.
A city rebuilt from nothing
Cripplegate was all but flattened in the Blitz. In 1951 the ward had a resident population of 48. The City Corporation debated what to do with the site from 1952 and in September 1957 took the decision that still surprises people: to build housing, not offices. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's plans, first drawn in 1956, were revised and approved at the end of 1959; Arup joined in 1960; construction began in the mid-1960s and the last housing was finished in the mid-1970s, with the Barbican Centre following in 1982.
The flats were never social housing. They were let at market rents to professionals who wanted to live near the office, and most are now privately owned. That distinction matters to the Barbican's reputation: it is a Brutalist estate that was always well funded, well maintained and well populated, and it shows.
The towers: a triangle with three prows
The three towers share a plan: an equilateral-ish triangle with a central well containing three lifts, and three large flats per floor, each occupying a corner and taking its living room out into the prow. In Lauderdale, the flats are numbered by floor — 171, 172, 173 on the seventeenth — and each faces a different way: the first with rooms to the west and balcony to the north, the second rooms north and balcony east, the third rooms east and balcony south.
Balconies run continuously round every floor behind thick upswept concrete balustrades — a detail Arup and the architects developed together in 1961 — and it is the repetition of that balustrade, forty times up the shaft, that gives the towers their unmistakable saw-tooth edge. Above the fortieth floor the plan breaks: penthouses of up to three storeys with roof gardens step in and up to form the jagged crown.
Lauderdale and Shakespeare are near-identical at 44 storeys; Cromwell, the first built, is one storey shorter. Shakespeare was briefly in the Guinness Book of Records as the tallest residential building in Europe. Lauderdale has a double-height glazed street entrance and, uniquely, two ground-floor shops.
The concrete: hammered by hand
The 1959 scheme did not propose rough concrete at all. It specified white marble facing with mosaic-tile balcony edges; the exposed finish was an economy imposed by the City. What the architects did with that economy is the Barbican's great technical achievement.
Wall panels were cast against plywood shuttering and left to cure for 28 days, then — once in place — worked over by hand with pick hammers to break the skin of the concrete, remove the pour joints and expose the Pen Lee granite aggregate beneath. Historic England records the exposed surfaces as largely pick-hammered, with smaller areas bush-hammered. Test panels were made below Frobisher Crescent before the technique was approved. The result is a surface that is neither smooth nor board-marked but pitted and crystalline, catching light in a way that poured concrete does not and weathering far better than the untreated concrete of most Brutalist buildings. It is the reason the Barbican still looks new.
