Film Indetail Studios
Photography Elliot Sheppard
Production and Words Nell Card

LionHeart grew up in Kentish town, the son of a Grenadian architect. Initially, he followed in his father’s footsteps, studying architecture at the University of East London. Outside of the lecture theatre, he discovered the spoken-word circuit. At the same time, he began to experience episodes of depression and anxiety. His girlfriend at the time took him to the Barbican and it was here that LionHeart first began to write poetry. “I didn’t think London had a space like this,” he recalls. “The environment facilitated a sense of calmness and it became an emotional home for me – an urban utopia that allowed me to escape my mental paradigm of negativity.”

We asked LionHeart if he’d kept any of his early words, but he is resolutely forward-facing (and not great at filing). On a recce of our location for this film (an apartment on the 24th floor of the Lauderdale Tower) he took himself off into a quiet room and sketched the beginnings of a new piece. In a few effortless, effervescent lines, LionHeart conjures the sense of possibility that propels us on the hunt for a new home:

“They say you’ll just know,
So choosing a new home is more about
The trust that comes from letting go
And less about control …”

For him, that sense of possibility is chiselled into the fabric of the estate, which – as Olivia Laing, a Barbican resident, reminds us in the foreword of ‘Barbican Residents’ – “arose like a phoenix from the ashes, the direct product of the destruction and horror of war.”

“The Barbican knew way before I did
Wayfinding through its fluid brutalism,
Open to mutable uses, surfaces of
Purpose, intuitive compositions,
Whispering a new vision,
A new way of living.”

For LionHeart, that original vision remains bright and tangible – even on the foggiest of London days. En route to Lauderdale, he discovers an area of the estate he’s never encountered before – a pair of disorientating caretaker cubbies/plant rooms that mirror each other. For Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, there was magic in the mundane. LionHeart finds this at every turn and runs with it.

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