In a family law matter, and particularly in a criminal law matter, it may be better to go to solicitors from the outset, but for civil law matters in England and Wales it is normally appropriate to engage a barrister direct for initial advice. For civil law matters, solicitors are not normally necessary at that initial stage but, depending on the case, it may be necessary to engage solicitors later on if there is civil litigation. But if you have a firm of solicitors which you regularly use for civil law matters, and you prefer at the outset to engage a barrister through those solicitors, rather than direct, that can, of course, be done. See here for a brief introduction to the difference between civil law, family law, and criminal law.
To find a barrister, qualified in the law of England and Wales, to engage direct, start with a Specialist Bar Association:-
Find out whether there is a specialist Bar Association - SBA - for the relevant area of law. Each SBA is run by barristers who practise in the same field of law and you can find a list of SBAs for England and Wales here. You can check the membership criteria on an SBA's website to see if it is a requirement of membership that over half of a barrister member's work comes within the area of law of the SBA, or whether the membership requirements are looser with membership open to those who do a "substantial amount" of such work, etc. Membership of an SBA will not directly tell you how good a barrister is but, all other things being equal, people tend to get better at things the more they do them, so membership of an SBA which requires that over half (for example) of a barrister's work comes within the overall specialism of the SBA would be a positive sign.
Having found the appropriate SBA, you can do a Google search and include the name of the SBA in the Google search. For example if the matter is about rights of way you could do the following Google search:-
Barrister “Property Bar Association” “rights of way”
A few of the search hits might be articles or other items which just happen to have those phrases but the great majority of hits should be for individual barristers who are members of the SBA - either their personal website or their profile page within a group website such as the Bar Council's Direct Access Portal.
The webpage or website of a barrister will typically tell you how long they have been practising and the areas of law they specialise in. When looking at the details of the specialist areas of law a barrister practises in bear in mind that if there is a large list you cannot tell from that which areas they do a lot of work in and which areas they have done a limited amount of work in (and perhaps would like to do more work in).
If your Google search turns up the profile page of a barrister from the Direct Access Portal bear in mind the following
"Rights and entitlements"
Don't be misled by the Rights and Entitlements shown on the left hand side of the profile page of a barrister on the Portal. These are based on the framework of some of the restrictions on who is legally allowed to provide various kinds of legal services. However they are not necessarily a good guide to the type of work a particular barrister specialises in. For example in order to protect vulnerable people, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 restricts who can provide immigration advice. As a result of what is now Schedule 18 of the Legal Services Act 2007, all barristers are allowed to provide immigration advice. In actual fact only a relatively small minority of barristers actually practise in immigration law but, in order to avoid regulatory duplication, all barristers regulated by the Bar Standards Board are legally allowed to provide immigration advice because barristers are trusted not to claim expertise in areas they do not practise in. So the fact that a barrister, like all barristers listed on the Portal, has "Immigration Work" listed under their Rights and Entitlements does not mean they practise in immigration law: you have to look at their profile to see information provided by the barrister about the areas of law they actually practise in.
"Fees £££"
Each barrister with a profile page on the Direct Access Portal can, if they wish, give their hourly fee rate in one of five bands. This field is optional but is not highlighted as being optional and many barristers therefore feel obliged to enter it despite the fact that most barristers (unlike most solicitors) will quote a fixed fee for each piece of work they do based on their prediction of the amount of work likely to be needed. The fee remains fixed even if it turns out that more work than expected is needed (as long as the extra work is still within the agreed scope of the piece of work). So any hourly fee rate shown is usually just a notional rate used when deciding what fixed fee to quote rather than an actual basis of charging. It may be only a rough guide, not applicable to every kind of work the particular barrister quotes for.