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.
The shopping centre has long been demolished and the gyratory tamed. Only the elephant survives, although now in a new location. The once unlovely district, known to most of its residents — including, decades ago, the young Michael Caine — simply as the Elephant, is in the throes of one of Zone One London’s most dramatically transformative urban “glow-ups”.
Read more: Why I live in Elephant & Castle: activist Peter Tatchell on his vibrant, changing south London area
This week saw another major landmark in the reinvention of a part of south London more central than you think — it is only a mile and a half from Parliament Square and two from the Strand.
Developers Get Living revealed the first roster of retailers signed up at the shiny new town centre being created as part of the huge £4 billion regeneration that has already been under way for two decades. Get Living has borrowed locals’ affectionate name for their area for the shiny new town centre, The Elephant, when it officially opens towards the end of this year. A glossy promotional video shows a glamorous-looking Elephant & Castle at sunset unrecognisable from the gritty urban landscape of days of yore.
The retail element will be anchored by Marks & Spencer, which is pioneering a “market-style” format focusing on fresh produce and everyday essentials.
Other brands will include Brooklyn’s Blank Street Coffee, opening in the summer as a sort of advance guard. It will bring offerings such as blueberry matcha latte that would have been a baffling concept to the young Maurice Micklewhite, as Caine was originally known, growing up in a pre-fab in the 1950s.
There will also be a healthy food café, Jungle Berry, offering “a sustainable, wellness-led menu centred on premium açaí and other nutritious treats”.
It is all a far cry from the extraordinary diversity of dozens of independent traders, mainly Latin American and black owned, which filled the old shopping centre before it was knocked down in 2020.
A handful of longer standing local businesses, including Latin food market DistriAndina, currently trading from a railway arch, will relocate to The Elephant.
The Elephant town centre is at the heart of the second phase of a lengthy and at times bitterly opposed regeneration — or as the determined campaigners in the “Up The Elephant” group saw it, unwelcome gentrification — of an area renowned for its post-war brutalism.
The makeover of Elephant & Castle is one of the most remarkable examples of how restless 21st-century London is constantly reinventing itself
A masterplan was adopted by Southwark council as long ago as 2004 but it faced years of determined opposition. One of the first elements of the transformation — the demolition and subsequent redevelopment of the huge, but decaying 1,200 home Heygate Estate by another property company LendLease — was decried by some as an act of aggressive social engineering.
Now the battles are over and the regeneration has reached a point of no return.
But Rick de Blaby, chief executive of specialist build-to-rent developer Get Living, says he still has the scars of what he ruefully described as “a very rough planning ride” that included two judicial reviews. The first phase, known as Elephant Central and featuring 374 new homes for rent, was completed as long ago as 2016.
Now the £500 million phase two, on the site of the old shopping centre, is almost built out and will be largely done and dusted by the end of this year. The third and final phase, known as the west site, will deliver 507 built-to-rent homes and 452 student beds and won consent at the end of last month.
It is being built on the site of the London College of Communication, formerly the London College of Printing — where alumni include Charles Saatchi — which is relocating to a new home at The Elephant. That is for the future. For now De Blaby is firmly focused on bringing the one million sq ft of phase two to its completion on schedule.
It will include 485 new homes for rent, including 172 classified as “affordable” across three towers, 55,000 sq ft of workspace, dozens of shops, restaurants, bars and cafés, a five-screen cinema, and the new London College of Communication campus.
There is also a new Northern Line station entrance and a cavernous ticket ready for any future extension of the Bakerloo Line, which currently ends at Elephant & Castle. The famed pink elephant will be relocated outside the station entrance. The new campus, part of the University of the Arts London, will open in 2027 for 5,500 students. It will house the UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre, including the archives of film maker Stanley Kubrick. The cultural collections will be open to the public.
A new public space was officially unveiled and named Dr Belfield Clarke Square last month after a local physician and civil rights leader, who was one of the first black doctors to sit on the council of the British Medical Association.
Elephant & Castle should be seen as an exemplar of how London should be regenerating
The development, designed by architects Allies and Morrison, has not been an easy undertaking. Building a new Tube station, a new university, the commercial elements and three towers has made it a “very technical complicated project”.
But as you would expect, De Blaby, who steps down from the role in 2026 after more than 40 years in the industry and seven years as chief executive, is a passionate advocate for his valedictory scheme.
He says: “Elephant & Castle should be seen as an exemplar of how London should be regenerating everywhere. It’s got to work for everyone in the community in an environment that is one of the most multi-cultural places in London with big Caribbean, Latin American, Asian, Portuguese communities, and a major LGBT+ presence — it’s really pretty mixed.
“At the end of it we have got to create a place that has a definition and a personality, where people live, eat, work, meet, collide into each other in that wonderful multi-cultural way that is what Elephant & Castle was always about.
“We don’t create the community, but we create the stage that enables people to make it what they want it to be.”
The real test will come in the summer when the homes are launched on the market and residents start to move into their apartments in the towers and populate the “new town”.
Elephant & Castle is already pretty well connected, served by two Underground lines, a mainline station and 28 bus routes.
It currently sits at the southern end of the Bakerloo line. Transport for London are looking favourably on a possible extension as far as Lewisham, a potential development that De Blaby describes as “an utter game changer” for Elephant & Castle that could make it one of the best connected town centres outside central London.
For anyone who has lived in the capital for 20 years or more, the makeover of Elephant & Castle is one of the most remarkable examples of how restless 21st-century London is constantly reinventing itself.
But it does not yet feel as if it has had the character and vibrancy gentrified out of it. For now Londoners should celebrate that the once derided Elephant can take its place among the capital’s growing line-up of neighbourhoods feeling the love of the investment of which they have long been starved.
