Diary – 12 May 2012

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a hell of a lot of them. They are unswept and crumbling, their only redeeming feature a scattering of daisies in the cracks. Reminded of Walter Pater’s writing of Botticelli’s Venus ‘powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies’, I prayed no busybody with the necessary broom will remove this small triumph of nature over the most brutal urban architecture that I know.