EC2 can be easily split into three areas - the City, the area north of Broadgate/Liverpool Street and the Barbican. The City section (see EC3 for more about this office world) forms probably about 75% of our postcode, and has crept in recent times up Bishopsgate (the eastern border of our postcode) to reach Norton Folgate.
Liverpool Street station is here too, now resplendent in its late Eighties makeover and now with no competition from Broad Street station, demolished to make way for Broadgate, an office-bound extravaganza with, yes, an ice-rink in the middle. EC2 has some of the real heavyweights of the City, with the old headquaters of the City at Guildhall and the likes of Moorgate and London Wall.
The area from Broadgate north to Old Street is one that has held on surprisingly long against the City's awesome powers. Full of old offices, warehouses and yards, it has piecemeal redevelopments with firms taking advantage of cheaper rents before the bubble inevitably bursts.
It does feel strange that the trendier amongst us should have seemingly leapfrogged the area to land in Hoxton, but there are some notable conversions. Pennywell Chambers on Great Eastern Street now hosts 65 flats on what is currently a traffic-laden and atmospherically dead road, but surely not for long.
A few complete houses survive in the north-west corner, by the giant Old Street roundabout, but it is warehouse conversions at the very northern edge of EC2 where most of the action has taken place - effectively across the road from Hoxton.
There are loft apartments on Curtain Road (site of London's first theatre, 1586) and on New Inn Yard. Curtain Road has 28 flats set in a six-storey block, with a dozen of them reserved for live/work areas.
It is to the Barbican that first thoughts turn on housing in the City. It is the result of London's only firestorm in the war, when a concerted effort to wipe out the City of London on one specific night - 29th December, 1940 - was thwarted by poor weather. The first wave, of incendiary bombs, got through. The second wave, of high-explosives, never took off.
The attack was most successful north of the Guildhall, where printing and book trades found themselves tailor-made for incendiaries. The blaze in these parts was so fierce, and the damage so total, that even the street plan disappeared along with the buildings. And so, in 1959, the architects' firm of Chamberlain, Powell and Bon was hired to begin one of the great rebuilds of London history.
They did not finish until 1982, and the size and piecemeal nature of the building programme left it confusing to many. It became the butt of many jibes about its bewildering effect on anyone trying to get about. With streets in the sky, it perplexed many. But the Barbican was too big and too important to let such sniping bring it down.
The Barbican sailed on to become in demand and downright cool. Its success can be measured in two ways, with only 10% of the flats now being rented from the City Corporation - all the rest are now leaseholds - and the seal of Grade II listed status conferred in 2001. The flats are many and varied, and the huge size of the northern towers of Cromwell, Lauderdale and Shakespeare tend to draw attention away from the other 18 blocks mostly to the east.
The Barbican looks in on itself, with the centrepiece of a long stretch of water and gardens running from west-east, dividing the arts' complexes to the north from the school and St. Giles Cripplegate church to the south. There are many styles of flat, the majority 1-2 beds, with cleanliness and security as popular features on the estate.
Their Achilles' heel has been the outmoded underfloor heating and the service charges which have tended to fluctuate with rebuilding and renewal works on the blocks. These should be settling down in the near future, with the understandable teething troubles ironed out.
It is of course, a famous place for culture, with a concert hall, two theatres, a cinema, a library and a school of music and drama. Perhaps the days of its operators bemoaning the fact that they had every resource but were in the wrong place are now over. The public transport is in the right spot, with Barbican and Moorgate tubes on either side of the complex.
The fiercely proud residents' association is perhaps the best indicator of how popular the Barbican now is, along with the fact that those who get there rarely move out. The Richmond and Barnes of central London.
Steve Roberts
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