Maybe it's the sooty stains clinging to its soaring stacks of curvaceous balconies that make him feel at home. Or the gnarled, pick-hammered concrete walls that remind him of the rugged coal faces of the Woolley Colliery in West Yorkshire. Or perhaps it is the expansive views, private terraced gardens and 24/7 concierge service, with world-class concert hall and gallery on tap – all right in the heart of the City of London.
Whatever the attraction, Arthur Scargill is reluctant to give up his £1.5m flat in the Barbican Centre, for which the National Union of Mineworkers forks out £34,000 a year. And it's not hard to see why.
Conceived as a brave new Belgravia, to bring the professional classes back to the middle of the City, the Barbican rose from the rubble of a blitz bombsite as a self-contained walled city, a 40-acre vertical paradise of housing, offices, shops and schools, all floating above a cavernous plinth of cultural facilities.
A gargantuan undertaking, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and built through the 60s and 70s, it was declared "one of the wonders of the modern world" by the Queen, when she finally opened it in 1982, only to be reviled in subsequent decades, continually topping polls of London's ugliest buildings.
Now brutalism is back, we have learned to love concrete chic, and architects, designers, bankers and lawyers queue up for their own multi-million pound place in one of the serrated spires. It is in demand as a film set too, depicted as the base of MI6 in the last Bond film, Quantum of Solace.
Down below, the Barbican is a thrilling, multi-levelled place to explore – networks of aerial walkways weaving between stacks of terraced streets and curving crescents, providing glimpses into sunken gardens and tumbling waterfalls. In the middle of it all lurks a vast tropical house, a kind of hanging gardens of Babylonian brutalism, where tangles of vines trail over balconies and knotted roots cling to concrete columns. Home to green singing finches, Java sparrows, diamond doves and Japanese quails, it feels like the jungles of Angkor Wat set in a multistorey carpark.
I can see why Arthur is reluctant to leave – though surely none of this beats a cottage in Barnsley.
