please empty your brain below

According to this site, the model of the elephant with castle was relocated from the original pub to the shopping centre as part of the first redevelopment, so nothing much changes.
Much as redevelopment is often necessary, I too miss the rapidly vanishing "collection of diverse eclectic run-down/inexpensive shops in a 60s/70s wormhole" that are steadily vanishing from our urban environments.
I can't mourn for the inside of the shopping centre, which was always half-empty and full of the sort of shops that could easily relocate to a nearby shop parade. I will miss the claptrap expanse of stalls that lined the outside of the shopping centre, who presumably don't fit in with the new Elephant Park.
The only place in London where I could find guaro, specifically Cacique Guaro (Costa Rican liquor) in a shop, one where they didn't speak English. I hope the shop owners have found another location for their unique selection of goods.
Also gone is the Coronet, a much-loved music venue, once the ABC Cinema which had a fe 1930s deco interior.
How does this tie in with what used to be Alexander Fleming House, which was quite near the shopping centre?

This says it was renamed Metro Central Heights and converted to flats some years ago: I worked there one summer on a Vacation Students' Scheme in the Social Research Branch of what was then the DHSS in the early 80s.
The only place in the UK where you could get Colombian pesos. Also Colombian hairdressers where I could practice my Spanish and a great Colombian restaurant.

Now we transpontines must slog over to the Seven Sisters although Peckham Rye has its Colombian shops hidden away.

Who needs to travel when London has it all. African waist beads sold at Peckham!
Chz -- your recollections of the Elephant shops must be based on its later tenants. Back in the 70s, when I first visited it when working in Great Suffolk Street, it had a Woolworths, a WH Smith and a supermarket as well as the small shops. I spent many a lunch hour there. And it was packed with people. Like Steve, I miss these places.
Charles -- Yes, I only moved to London in 2002. It's always been a bit sad inside in the time I've been here though. There was a popular Polish cafe in there for a while, but they moved to Waterloo while the owners of the mall dithered about selling up. The Colombian places will also certainly find a home, too. Everything that was still open could fit on a short High St. parade anywhere in the city.
A statue of french dimensions would look very good at that road junction. IMO.
It's always been a hideous building. I know we're in an age where we're trying to rehabilitate the reputation of 60s buildings but this was a monstrous excrescence, ironically of Elephantine proportions. It was already wearing badly in the early 80s. I entirely agree that the tenants should be treated fairly and helped to continue trading but as a building, this was one of the worst. Let's just make sure we don't need to go through the same process in another 55 years.

And when my most abiding memory of the elephant-with-a-castle-on-its-back is a grinning Jim Davidson perched atop it, I can't get sentimental about that either.
When at school, I spent a fortnight's work experience at the architects who had designed the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre. I am not sure if this had done their practice much good as the office was extremely quiet...
For the best part of the last 20 years, the Elephant has been an awful, hideous place with a general air of decline and dilapidation. Yes, for every decent shop, you'll find 10 or more tawdry or empty units. The area is best rid of it and the eyesore building plonked there in the 60s without the slightest thought of how it fitted in with the existing architecture.
Judging from today's and yesterday's photos the developers are struggling to find a set of equally sized capital letters.
More importantly it will allow the construction of an escalator shaft down the Northern line platforms.
In the 70s there was a Wimpy there in the Elephant too. I think the London School of Fashion used to be opposite. But I could be wrong about that.
If anyone wants to see a model of what will replace the shopping centre and college in the context of the area as a whole, one is visible through the window of Allies & Morrison architects at 85 Southwark Street. You can recognise it from the Strata building, with its distinctive turbines.

The buildings of the London College of Communications (rather than Fashion, although it was probably called the London College of Printing in the’70s) are also to go in the redevelopment, and there’s already scaffolding on part of it.

And the Wimpy was there until recently. Of the high street shops, there was a W H Smith, Greggs, Poundland and Co-Op (replacing a Tesco). But as others have said, the USP was the specialist shops, especially the Latin American ones.










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