Elephant & Castle may have sometimes felt like a modernist concrete hell born of a sadistic 1960s town planner, but as a place name it has been on London’s map for more than 400 years. In Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, Antonio advises Sebastian “in the south suburbs, at the Elephant, is best to lodge.” The reference is widely held to be an in-joke reference to an inn just a mile from the Bard’s theatre on Bankside that would have been well known to his audiences.
But a more recent cohort of Londoners will associate the area with the terrifying traffic gyratory and blancmange pink 1960s modernist shopping centre adorned with a statue of an — also pink — elephant carrying the turret of a castle on its back.
