By Richard Reynolds
Visitors, commentators and some residents have for decades perceived the Elephant and Castle’s shabby and dilapidated pedestrian realm as the neighbourhood’s big blight. The area is dominated by its urban motorway snaking around a concrete jungle of dangerous, foreboding council estates and pedestrians have been forced to cross the high-speed gyratory in luridly painted, labyrinthine, crime-ridden underpasses. On such clichés big decisions are made. Politicians, planners and their supporters seized on generic perceptions of predominantly post-war inner-city landscapes as evidence of the need for reconstruction of Elephant and Castle’s physical and social landscape.
I live in Perronet House, a council tower block just over the road from the London College of Communication. Changing perceptions of this block has been one of my long-term local projects. It required developing an online presence, new branded identity, public events, merchandise and press coverage.
I’m best known for guerrilla gardening –transforming pockets of shabby public ground without permission. My neighbourhood has been rich with opportunities to garden because of the value that urban planners in the three post war decades placed on greenery as a complementary element to their enthusiasm for wider roads and taller buildings. However those in charge of this green public space today — Southwark Council and Transport for London (TfL) — do not value it. They see the Elephant’s green infrastructure as a nancial burden, of such insignificance they are clearing it away and selling it for construction.
TfL have removed expansive lawns, hedgerows and five mature trees at the Elephant and Castle to make way for a wider, longer ring-road and significantly cut back their proposed mitigating green infrastructure that was used in their public marketing as recently as December 2014. At a micro scale guerrilla gardening solves some of this abuse, with small public spaces such as the beds outside Perronet House, the playground within the Hayles Estate or tree pits up London Road. Guerrilla gardens are not just greenery where it would not exist otherwise, but an implicit communication that someone cares for the place.
[pullquote align=”right”]The new junction tells its own story; no one can escape the greater dominance of traffic.[/pullquote]Guerrilla gardening played a part within a multi-pronged local campaign pressing Lend Lease, the developers of the Heygate Estate, into valuing its extensive public green infrastructure, which was destined for clearance to make way for the foundations of a higher-density private estate. The developer gradually realised that retaining some of the 1970s tree planting made sense. The Heygate Estate is now being redeveloped and rebranded as Elephant Park. Sadly the reality will not be nearly as park-like as what was destroyed but at least saving some of the mature 1970s green infrastructure and marketing it as a park is likely to positively contribute to the Elephant and Castle’s reputation.
More recently I’ve been involved in the debate over the transformation of the Elephant and Castle roundabout, the best-known feature of the area.
While ten years of guerrilla gardening at the roundabout have helped cheer up the dilapidated landscape, the need for much bigger improvement was clear and universally accepted. But the vision for improvement was one I and hundreds of others vehemently opposed. The £25 million project is designed and funded by a Strategic Stakeholder Group of Southwark Council, TfL and adjacent landowners with an inventive and well resourced marketing campaign. Up against this were users of the space, residents associations and other groups.
What is branded as one of Transport for London’s Road Improvement Schemes is actually primarily about the piazza-cation of transport infrastructure and standardisation of the Elephant and Castle as an ordinary part of central London. It’s not about safe, efficient, pleasant journeys. The project is attempting to change perceptions of Elephant and Castle to attract developers.
The redevelopment of the roundabout only superficially sought to improve conditions for cyclists: The scheme being built means greater congestion on average for every user and increased air pollution where most pedestrians are waiting for buses. These are considered acceptable costs by TfL and their partners in return for creating a piazza where people could linger.
[pullquote align=”right”]Supporters of the campaign frequently commented on the appeal of the brightly coloured patterned tiles in the subways, made from German porcelain.[/pullquote] ‘Save Our Subways’ campaign fought the proposal to close the underpasses beneath the roundabout, using rational arguments alongside emotive elements that highlighted the subways’ cultural value. There was a campaign website, reporting through social media, online films and guided tours to bring to life the rich set of murals painted by David Bratby in the 1990s. I hung one subway with fragrant herbs as part of the 2014 London Festival of Architecture and commissioned a choral requiem which was performed in the subways a few weeks before the first one was bricked up and pumped full of concrete. Supporters of the campaign frequently commented on the appeal of the brightly coloured patterned tiles in the subways, made from German porcelain. These were a collaboration between Southwark Council and London College of Communication in the 1990s.
Just before the battle was finally lost, the subways were featured in a lm promoting the most recent single from local band, The Maccabees. The closing seconds of The Maccabbees’ film shows the start of TfL’s attack on them and includes a memorial dedication to David Bratby’s lost artwork. Their number one album also uses a 1960s photograph of the roundabout’s listed Faraday Memorial on its cover.
Two years of campaigning led to little success in influencing the design, although we did manage to save three mature trees on London Road by encouraging TfL to widen the road away from them. Now the campaign is in a new phase. The new junction tells its own story; no one can escape the greater dominance of traffic. Without the subways the pedestrian experience is intense and stressful; a choice of stop-start frustration at slow crossings or dangerous short cuts.
My revised campaign purpose is to portray Elephant and Castle’s junction as in greater need of major investment than before. I call the roundabout ‘The Bend’ a place people are ‘going round’, but not as well as when the place was a roundabout with subways.
No doubt TfL and their partners will portray the project as a success once work is completed in May, but privately a few people working for TfL have said it’s an almighty cock-up and requires significant tweaks. Pedestrian crossing times have been cut to reduce the traffic congestion and unfashionable, new pedestrian guardrails have had to be added to some pavements to try and make safe what was intended to be an clutter-free elegant vista of new stone paving. TfL are soon to commission perception enhancing pop-up content for their piazza and are expected to put into place their branding of the junction with the name Elephant Square replacing its road-centric Elephant & Castle Roundabout.
TfL have won the battle for building a new junction but time will tell whether they’ve won the peace, for if popular perceptions remain as bad or worse than they were about the old roundabout, then their objective will have failed.
Image by Richard Reynolds (remixed)