My first trip to the Barbican was to see Alice in Wonderland on stage. I was six or seven and it was my first play outside of a school hall. The show was colourful, vibrant, charming. I remember a lot of moving set pieces that, instead of immersing me in the world of Wonderland, just reminded me that I was watching a play. Yet somehow this was more magical to me, in a weird and unsettling way. The performance felt intimate and fake and I got the sense of sinister unreality I always did when I watched a stage play as a child. I always felt like one of the actors would suddenly turn to me and drag me away into a hidden, unknown world just behind our own. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome prospect.

This is one of my most solid childhood memories and it’s one of my favourites. I went to see Alice with my dad. Just us embarking at a Tube station I’d never set foot in before and then I stood in the Barbican’s lobby, gazing around in wonder while my dad picked up the tickets. It was one of the first times I really felt like I was on an adventure. It remains one of only a few good memories with my father.

My first memory of the Barbican is of a nowhere in-between place, like all the airports we bounced between when I was young. While we waited for the theatre doors to open, I felt like I was awaiting a destination. I still remember the lighting, the space, the seats.

I didn’t go back to the Barbican until I was in uni. I heard about the Curve, a free gallery in the building, and I was broke and it seemed like a good idea to go see this landmark from my memory.

The Barbican feels a lot smaller and a lot darker than it did when I was small and nervous with adventure. Every time I go, I think about how much the world seems to have shrunk. But the Barbican is labyrinthine and it still feels like that nowhere place. I’ve spent a lot of time there waiting; for a cinema to open, for a friend, for my nerves to calm.

It’s still an airport lobby, filled with that familiar sense of possibility, curiosity, adventure. My trips to the Barbican always feel like opportunities to learn and grow and experience something new. Since returning after more than a decade away, I’ve got a whole new set of memories to sit alongside the one with my father. I’ve encountered some of my life’s most affecting, immersive, thoughtful works of art in the Curve. I’ve found home more than once, in exhibits and film screenings. The Barbican has provided me the space to breathe and exist at some of the roughest times in my life.

The world is full of barriers. Barriers between people, barriers to access, barriers I cannot always cross. In the middle of a depressive episode, all I can see - all I can feel - are these barriers. It’s overwhelming. My whole life, I’ve wanted the feeling of freedom and openness that comes with airport lobbies.

The Barbican can’t physically transport me anywhere, unless that hidden gateway to Wonderland is still there somewhere, but it is a hub of culture, creativity, and curiosity. For me, one of the most important methods of engaging with the world is through art. Through other people’s experiences, their feelings and questions, their voices - and our own.

The Barbican amplifies work from around the globe and it’s here that I’m able to feel connected to a world that is bigger and more complex and more wonderful than it often feels on the other side of those barriers. The Barbican reminds me that I’m a part of something greater than myself. It reminds me that airport lobbies connect people from all over, not just in the airport but on the other end of the flight path. In family and friends, in history, in shared meaning, and in telling your stories.

The Barbican is my link to people I will never meet and a link to those closest to me. More than that, it’s an anchor. It’s a link to myself. The Barbican has been here for me since I was a child just beginning to understand London, to understand home. It’s a symbol of my city’s arts and culture scene; more accessible than most, more varied, more radical. And it gives me some freedom; freedom to be a part of the world despite all those barriers, freedom in solace and solitude, freedom to hope.

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by exploration and Brutalism.
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