The Barbican Map was created towards the end of 2025 by Ben Roper, who founded PlayCulture and spent his early career working in film and television. Ben knows the Barbican estate better than most but was surprised to discover that there isn't a complete map that shows you how to traverse the space. In particular the connections between the various levels and routes of the walkways (known as the 'Highwalks') aren't recorded anywhere online, leading to people getting lost and disorientated by the Barbican's complex architecture.

Ben would frequently bump into people who were lost when he visited the estate and help them to get 'un-lost'. Ben said about these interactions "people are often very close to where they need to be, but because the Barbican is so complex and dense they were missing one simple connection, and that was all that was stopping them finding their own way". Often those people were trying to locate the Barbican Centre or Conservatory, and had wandered into the estate expecting to be able to use Google to navigate, only to discover that the multiple stacked levels of the estate made that impossible. Google Maps is great for road-users, but in complex pedestrianised areas large-scale navigation tools are less useful.

After extensive research Ben discovered that there had been several attempts in the past to create an accessible map of the Barbican Estate, but unfortunately as these were generally presented in print-form, the multiple levels made them hard to read and they lacked useful detail. Additionally so many of these previous attempts used an abstract art style that tried to simplify the estate, but this made them difficult to understand and relate to reality.

The Barbican Centre, which includes a theatre, cinemas and other attractions, is the most-visited attraction in the City of London and welcomed 1.54 million visitors in 2024. How could it be that an area attacting over 100,000 people per month had no publically accessible record of how to access the space?