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?

In autumn 2025 Ben had been working on a project for PlayCulture, a community-focussed project partly funded by Sport England that's designed to help people to get outside and play social outdoor games. The project involves setting up games similar to Hide and Seek for adults as a way to work on fitness and make new friends. "The Barbican is one of several large pedestrianised areas in central London", Ben remarks, "these areas have immense value to the community as social, recreational and artistic spaces. We have to find new and creative ways to help people to take an active role in society. It's important for tackling lonliness and inactivity, especially for people for whom traditional sports or social activities aren't a good fit."

As a part of this project Ben had already mapped about 75% of the Barbican Estate to create a graphic map for use in videos. "It was only after spending several weeks trying to create a map of my own that it became obvious that no-one else had a record of this. The first thing you do is look for any existing data, and the only existing maps I could find were either long out-of-date, sometimes showing buildings that had been long-since demolished, or woefully lacking in detail."

And so Ben decided to create what, to his knowledge, was the only complete, current and public map of the Barbican. "I was leaning on my background in video production, so I strapped a camera to my head and started walking the estate, going everywhere you could go on-foot. Then I would come home and manually work out how everything connected together. There was simply no other way to do it." The mapping process took about four weeks and generated about 10 hours of video footage, with a further two weeks for creating the online interface that people would use to explore the map. "You'd think you could use satellite imagery for this, and you can for some of it, but the problem is that so much of the walkable area of the Barbican is under cover of roofs, other buildings or sandwiched between its many levels."

While previous maps have created abstract versions of the estate, Ben wanted to create a map using intuituve landmarks. This means that the recognisable features of the estate in real life need to be recognisable on the map. "It's a balance of information. You don't want to absolutely fill the map with detail, but you need to decide what the main features are, and then represent them on the map with a graphic style that retains their essence." The goal was to create a map that people could navigate naturally, spotting things around them, seeing them on the map and intuitively understanding where they were.

After about six weeks the map was complete, along with a simple website interface. "The key thing that this map does, with its interactive home online, is allow you to jump between layers. If you're on level one and you come to some stairs, you can tap on the stairs and see exactly where they lead on level two."

One key accessibility feature of the Barbican Map is that it shows the location of every staircase, lift and ramp on the estate, and how they connect to different levels. "I was really keen to make sure this map would enable people to access the estate, and that goes for everyone, but especially for people who have limits on their mobility, for example if they use a wheelchair. For these people in particular the Barbican could be particularly intimidating or even dangerous." The map has clear labels that make it easy to understand which areas are step-free, and even shows common routes to popular destinations, both with steps and without.