Elephant & Castle

Flattened by the Blitz, rebuilt as the future in 1965, and being rebuilt again now - with Bedlam turned into the Imperial War Museum.

The name is from a coaching inn, written down in the Walworth manor court book in 1765 and rebuilt twice since. The story that it corrupts la Infanta de Castilla is repeated everywhere and is not true: an elephant carrying a castle was a heraldic device fifteen centuries before Eleanor of Castile. For most of the nineteenth century this was the busiest shopping place in London outside the West End, and people called it the Piccadilly of the south. The Trocadero opened in 1930 with three thousand seats and the largest Wurlitzer organ ever shipped to Britain. On the night of 10 May 1941 the junction sat at the centre of the target zone, and most of that went. What replaced it was the future as 1965 imagined it: the first covered shopping mall in Europe, 120 shops on three floors, with the Heygate Estate behind. Both have gone too - the centre shut in 2020 and came down the following January - and a third Elephant is going up in their place with a Latin American food market in it. London's Latin American community is concentrated along this stretch, and the traders the demolition displaced were much of what the place was known for. What survived is worth the walk. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle of 1861 stands at the junction, the Imperial War Museum occupies the old Bethlem hospital - Bedlam itself, moved here in 1815 - and a stainless steel box beside the roundabout is an electricity substation and a memorial to Michael Faraday at once.