Passing through the elephant

Preface
For the benefit of readers who may not know, Elephant and Castle is the name of a busy traffic, tube and rail intersection in south London, named after a Medieval pub on the site of a blacksmith's forge. This part of the city was flattened in the war by bombs falling just short of Westminster. From the early 1950s, it was redeveloped as part of the master plan for Greater London. Cars were catered for less than people. But people have clung tenaciously to the Elephant's perilous traffic islands ever since.

Next to the Elephant are some huge pre and post-war municipal housing schemes. They are thought by some to be architectural relics reminiscent of Stalinism. They are to be demolished and the tenants scattered to the four corners of the London borough of Southwark. Meanwhile, towers of more than 40 storeys will rise over the area. There'll be a new theatre, a new park, a new leisure centre and a huge 20-storey retail and residential ziggurrat. It should all be finished by 2014. There'll still be the glass and steel stump that is the London College of Communication (formerly printing). Generations of journalists, including me, have passed through.

I wrote a poem about the Elephant in 1995, before global warming, and this is an update.

Elephant and Castle 2008

A sickly, unnatural heat
Collides with the suya stalls
It toys with the lunchtime crowds
And warms the crumbling concrete.

This island at the city’s edge
Is part Lagos and part Warsaw
It is an agora, in the true sense,
A place to argue and assimilate.

Once pink, then red, the shopping mall
Is mouldering these days
But, despite the graffiti and cracked glass
It betrays, a pleasingly chaotic humanity.

The Coronet announces, bravely,
A meaningless jumble of words
‘Duckie presents gay shame’, it says –
Like the ravings of a madman.

Phones and shoes clutter the walkways
Bright beach towels, foreign sounds
The buses calypso through here
There is always a holiday feel.

Alexander Fleming House
A once grey relic, is flats now
In the gloomy pub that faces it
The ghost of Charlie Chaplin smiles.