About three years ago, with time to kill, I climbed an unlit staircase behind a fire door at the back of the Barbican Centre. There was no one around. With its forty acres of 1960s Brutalist concrete and notorious labyrinth of tower blocks and overhead walkways, the Barbican is one of the most undervisited places in London. I love it as I love hospitals and airports, for the way they allow you to occupy public space without being seen, without being public. Ignore the signs and they ignore you. At the top of the staircase, on the seventh floor, another door opened onto a corridor leading to a network of empty rooms. Or nearly empty: on the scuffed carpet was a bundle of cables, a telephone directory, a cluster of obsolete computer monitors, an industrial-size stainless steel catering trolley, a year-old copy of the Daily Mail. A blank whiteboard was the only item in what must have been a seminar room; an A4 printout minuted a 2003 meeting with a visiting dignitary. An ordinary vacant office or apartment is just another rental opportunity. An empty institutional space, on the other hand, is full of messages and cryptic signals.

LRB 6 November 2008 | PDF Download