The Elephant and Castle at 9:30am is rushing and tearing, revving and wheeling, banging and crashing and physically transforming at speed. A place characterised at one point in its history as south London’s answer to Piccadilly and at another as the location of some of the capital’s worst bombed-ravaged slums has seen a huge amount of regeneration endeavour during this century, some of it loudly opposed.
But a bastion of its post-war reconstruction period, the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, opened in 1965, was pretty much gone by 2021. In its place is forming a whole new retail, housing and leisure complex called simply The Elephant, part of which will be a whole new home for the London College of Communication (LCC) to replace its old one across the road. Six years ago, the student union was protesting against the move. Three years from now, a new generation will be studying amid its state-of-the-art 12 storeys above the local Northern line Underground station.
Monday morning saw the “topping out” of the new college building – a marking, with speeches, photographs and expressions of triumph and hope, of the stage of its construction when its maximum height has been reached.
Dignitaries included Professor Karen Stanton (pictured), interim president and vice-chancellor of the University of Arts, London, of which the LCC is a part. The occasion, she said, “reminds us of the ambition that we have to deliver a world-class creative education from this site” and also “the links that we have with Elephant and Castle, and the links we have with our community.” Representatives of local groups and Southwark Council’s civc mayor, Naimi Ali, were among those looking on.
Stanton’s words provided their own reminder of the under-recognised importance of London’s higher education institutions to the city – and to the country – as a whole and to the neighbourhoods they form part of. The current LCC building, formally opened the year before the shopping centre, was built in 1962 and enlarged in 1973.
In the beginning, it was the home the London College of Printing, a descendant of a line of London learning institutions based in various parts of the capital. For decades, it has been a bedrock of Elephant and Castle’s mood and mix, drawing young adults from far and near. Streams of its current 5,000 students flowed in through its front door as those attending the topping-out mustered outside, waiting to be guided across the teeming carriageways to the evolving base of the college’s future.
The new building, designed by Allies and Morrison, occupies (as it were) the rear left hand section of the site as viewed from the current one or from the adjacent Metropolitan Tabernacle, an imposing Reformed Baptist church whose original elements predate it by 100 years and isn’t going anywhere.
The developer is Get Living, known primarily for build-to-rent housing, but also for the other stuff you need for creating a neighbourhood. It is working in collaboration with Delancey, which instigated the establishment of Get Living as joint venture in 2013, continues to own a chunk of it, and constructor Multiplex.
Delancey’s development director Richard Palmer said a few words amid the naked concrete, as did Rick de Blaby, Get Living’s chief executive. Transport for London, which is to get a new ticket hall and entrance for the Tube station, was represented too. The scheme also includes 485 homes for rent, of which 172 will be at “affordable rent” levels. One tenth of the retail and work space will be let at below market rates too.
The Elephant scheme is Phase 2 (or the East Site) of the wider Elephant and Castle town centre programme. Phase 1, Elephant Central, is already completed, and includes Castle Square, where a special structure accommodates some of the market traders who used to operate from the old shopping centre site. Phase 3, also known as the West Site, will see the current LCC building replaced by nearly 500 new homes, along with shops and restaurants and, says Delancey’s website, a “cultural venue” with room for 500 people.
Not all of the old Elephant and Castle has disappeared. As well as the Metropolitan Tabernacle, the famous memorial to Michael Faraday endures amid the traffic roar. Round the back of the emerging new buildings, small Latin American shops are still doing business in the railways arches, just as they were when the redevelopment work now coming to fruition was being planned, back in 2016. And, of course, the legendary elephant statue is still on the scene. Mustn’t forget that.
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