Musical work rises from the concrete Barbican

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Judith Weir, 53, wrote the 25-minute piece, Concrete, after a series of meetings at the centre sparked her curiosity about the site.

Ms Weir has been chosen by BBC Radio3 for its annual composer weekend at the Barbican when dozens of her scores, from chamber works to her opera The Vanishing Bridegroom, will be performed.

Concrete will be premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus as part of the weekend from 18 to 20 January.

She said: "It's a huge festival and I've been visiting the Barbican at odd hours, often in the early mornings for meetings with people.

"I started to think 'How did this come to be built?'"

The Barbican was built on land levelled in a giant German bombing raid on 29 December 1940. But Ms Weir said that as you walk around it you can still see fragments of previous eras such as a piece of Roman wall, Greek-inspired temples and remains of medieval churches. "That's what my piece is - it's fragments of the history of London." she said.

She describes the work as "an imaginary excavation of the Barbican Centre, burrowing through 2,500 years of historical rubble".

The work also has a spoken part taken from diarist John Evelyn's account of the Great Fire of London in 1666 which burned near the site. "I found it quite hard to find accounts of people who lived through the Blitz. But John Evelyn wrote a fantastic account of what happens when a city burns."