Alas it's not a safari park, it's a new enormous housing estate at Elephant & Castle. And yes, it looks exactly how you'd expect a new enormous housing estate to look.
It's big, around 25 acres in size, and will have around 3000 homes when it's complete, which it isn't yet. Several apartment blocks are finished and occupied, a few plots are still building sites and many areas remain empty. But ten years ago it used to look like this.
This was the Heygate Estate, one of Southwark's largest, built in Brutalist style in the early 1970s. Long slab blocks faced off towards Walworth Road and New Kent Road with a scattering of smaller flats inbetween, all linked by raised concrete walkways. Fifty years ago it was desirable and visionary, but before long bleak and uninviting, and eventually shady and shunned. It was an evocativeplaceto walkthrough but perhaps not to live.
The council plumped for regeneration in conjunction with a major developer and agreed a financially disadvantageous deal, spending more on planning and demolition than the paltry £50m they received. Tenants were decanted before alternative accommodation was available, with no intention of them ever coming back, although a few held on amid boarded-up desolation. And then in 2013 the site was sealed off, a few mature trees preserved in the centre and all the rest sequentially knocked down. Cue Elephant Park.
The flats look very different now, less monolithic and with stairwells instead of communal balconies. Whereas ground level was previously given over to endless rows of garages they now host commercial units, or will do if they ever rent them all out, and the obligatory car parking is concealed underneath. Previous residents got a concrete community centre and a rundown parade of essential shops and services. The new lot get a cinema room, gym, co-working space and roof terrace, because the new lot very much aren't council tenants.
The developers have made a big thing of the site's central park, even conscripting it into the site's new name. It takes advantage of a few retained mature trees but is otherwise is mostly lawn (sorry, "newly laid biodiverse grass") and roped-off playground. The park's smaller than it was due to be in the initial plans and isn't yet fully shadowed by residential towers. Marketing collateral makes a big thing of the fact it'll have a nature trail, which is about as cheap as environmental greenwash gets. Most of the flats in Park Central West and Park Central East either aren't adjacent to the park or look the wrong way.
One thing that's already up and running is Elephant Park's foodie destination, which is Sayer Street. One side is all cafes and restaurants, sequentially 'small plates & grill', Italian, Japanese, Ecuador/Spanish, Lebanese, Caribbean, Taiwanese and 'vacant'. A fried breakfast at the first of these will set you back £11 because this is no longer an impoverished estate, more somewhere to graze and brunch. On the opposite side of the street are three Insta-friendly sheds, or rather 'maker spaces', to temporarily boost the cultural credentials of the site. A garden centre, an art exchange and a podcast studio are the current lucky incumbents.
The marketing team at Elephant Park have gone big on elephants, assembling a cluster of glittery silver and gold-trunked sculptures in the piazza to the west of the park. I wasn't sure if the private security guard standing nearby was watching them or watching the rest of us - I suspect the latter. The marketing team also love their ampersands, dotting around various slogans like 'Live & Breathe', 'Green & Active' and 'Flavour & Energy'. They've not gone quite so overboard on Castles but there is a Castle Square, which thus far resembles a Boxpark but in ribbed timber.
Its two storeys are given over to micro retail units housing such delights as beauty salons, sweet shops and mobile phone emporia. One nice touch is the view over the park from the upper deck, although you have to be careful not to block the entrance to the lift in the process. Another nice touch is the provision of free public toilets, because these days developers have the wherewithal and the money in a way that councils have long since abandoned. And as a bonus the whole structure looks to be just temporary enough that it could be removed at a later date to provide a proper gateway to the estate from Elephant & Castle station.
It is essentially all change, but then it's all change all around Elephant & Castle at the moment. Some might call it much-needed redevelopment, others characterless gentrification, but the end result continues to be wholesale displacement. Elephant Park is certainly an attractive hotspot for incomers seeking convenience and lifestyle but the people I saw living in the Heygate a decade ago are long gone, maybe even to somewhere with a chippie.
