Barbican sailboats: a Plymouth yard that built other designers' hulls, not its own
Barbican sailboats came from a small Plymouth boatbuilder that never developed a house design of its own. Across its short range, Barbican Yacht Construction built to hull designs drawn by established outside naval architects, each model tracing to a different board rather than a single in-house lineage carried across the whole range.
Origins and ownership
Barbican Yacht Construction Limited was incorporated on 20 June 1978, according to Companies House records, with its registered office at Sugar House, Sutton Road, in Plymouth. The company was registered under the trade classification for building and repairing ships, a plain builder's registration rather than one naming a design office of its own.
The designers
The Barbican 33 traces to a Maurice Griffiths shoal-draught hull. Yachting Monthly called it "a 1980s late flowering" of a Griffiths design, with echoes of his earlier Golden Hind 31, and noted her swing keel, full sections, and a broad bow tapering to a fine stern. The Barbican 35 came from a different outside board entirely: launched in 1987, it was a reworking of Holman and Pye's Super Sovereign 35 ketch, converted into a masthead sloop with a new range of interiors. A smaller Barbican 30, at just under 30 feet, rounded out the range.
Construction through the eras
On the 33, Yachting Monthly found that a bigger rig than originally specified made her rather tender, though she came with a wheel as standard, unusual for a boat of her type. The 35 carried a different construction character altogether: built by Barbican Yacht Construction, its long-keeled, slim hull form echoed a hull shape from the mid-1970s, expressed in solidly built, traditional teak joinery rather than the shoal-draught, swing-keel character of the 33.
Who Barbican is for
A Barbican buyer isn't choosing a single house style. Each model in the range came off a different outside designer's board, built to that design by the same small Plymouth yard rather than shaped by a Barbican design office of its own: the shoal-draught, swing-keeled 33 and the traditional, long-keeled, teak-fitted 35 sit at opposite ends of that borrowed-design range.