Plaza de Arturo Barea

For decades this square had no official name and lived on nicknames: to some it was Plaza de Agustín Lara, after a bar on the corner; to others, Plaza de la Corrala, after the tenement courtyard beside it. Arturo Barea came to Madrid as a child, fatherless. His mother washed clothes on the banks of the Manzanares, and he grew up between two worlds: well-off aunt and uncle in the Palacio district paid for his schooling at the Escuelas Pías de San Fernando, the building overlooking this square, and on Sundays he went back to Lavapiés. Out of that Madrid split between luxury and slum came The Forging of a Rebel, the trilogy he wrote in exile in England, which made Lavapiés the setting of a novel. It appeared in English before Spanish; in Spain it could not be read until 1977. The name came through a neighbourhood push. A 2015 petition backed by Preston, Muñoz Molina and Gibson succeeded, and the plaque was unveiled in March 2017. Since the space had never had a name, christening it meant renumbering not a single door.

In La llama, the third volume of the trilogy, Barea recounts in the first person the burning of the Escuelas Pías de San Fernando on 19 July 1936, the day after the uprising. According to his account, fire was opened from the church tower on passers-by, which set off the assault and the burning of the building by Republican militiamen. The building remained in ruins until 2002, when its charred walls were incorporated into the new library and headquarters of the UNED. The square that today bears Barea’s name faces that very building.