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Colombian graffiti artist 'Guahce' tells story of Latin America

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Doing the personal side of the Unit 6 project, I have not done much to really think about or take action into exactly what I want to go into.

However talking in the last meeting I was thinking about how I wanted to branch off of our group project on Elephant and Castle to use the collective research we have done together to create something for a different audience.

Because we were thinking about as a group to take a more fine art approach to the project, I want to instead use my illustration skills to make a more designed approach to my work such as a leaflet, zine, map or instagram posts with information.

I was inspired by a talk that I went to on African, Caribbean, and Asian archives discussion where the tutor talked a lot about how we access information and I feel that this will be an important part that can come into play when thinking about an audience as well as accessibility.

I also want to take the project back a bit into decolonisation if I can which was my original passion for this project.

Before I was also looking at different community groups as well when we first started researching. I am part of Peckham Vision and also have been recently volunteering at Art in the Park which I want to use as some great real life inspiration and connections that can help me with this project. I really enjoy working within the community as I find that it is important to be aware of things that go on around where you live/ work.

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Elephant and Castle has been an important junction since Roman times.

However, it takes its name from a local pub built many centuries later.

Old Kent Road and Newington Causeway, two of the main roads which converge at the Elephant, roughly follow the path of two Roman routes - Watling Street and Stane Street - which led into Londinium via an early incarnation of London Bridge.

For much of its life, the settlements either side of this junction were two separate villages, Newington and Walworth, set among market gardens, fields and open marshland.

During the eighteenth century, as new bridges were built across the Thames, the area was transformed into a fashionable Georgian commuter suburb and by the Victorian period, industry and transport had led to a population increase. By the end of the century, the area was home to a diverse mix of people, living in everything from large detached Georgian homes to modest almshouses to traditional terraces.

WW2 bombing destroyed much of the area

It was between the 1890s and the 1940s that Elephant and Castle really came to life, earning its reputation as the ' Piccadilly of the South'. Residents had top quality entertainment on their doorstep: the Elephant and Castle Theatre, the Trocadero and the 4,000-seater South London Palace of Varieties all played host to the stars of the day such as Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd as well as a young Charlie Chaplin. Other entertainment and leisure facilities included dance palaces, 'penny gaff' theatres and the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall.

Commerce boomed, with grand new department stores like Rabbit's Shoes, Hurlock's and William Tarn & Co. Religion and welfare were originally centred on the ancient church of St Mary in Newington. Nearby, a huge Baptist church - the Metropolitan Tabernacle (which still exists today) was built for CH Spurgeon, 'the prince of preachers', while the Lock Hospital was located near Lock Fields, the site of the present-day Elephant Park development. Housing included the Drapers' Almshouses in Cross Street, terraces of townhouses in New Kent Road and elegant mansions in Marlborough Place.

Best of all, Elephant and Castle was easy to get to. 1829 had seen the arrival of the horse bus followed by the first overland rail link in 1862. In 1890, London Underground's Northern Line reached the area and, soon after, came electric trams in 1903, motorbuses in 1904 and the Baker Street and Waterloo (now Bakerloo) Line in 1906.

Although Elephant and Castle thrived in the late 19th and early 20th century, it also faced many problems. Slum developments grew up to house the expanding population and many residents faced increasingly poor living conditions.

Bombing destroyed much of the area during the Second World War. Afterwards, 50 acres were identified for redevelopment. High density, slab-block estates and a large gyratory road system replaced terraced streets and bombsites. The dance hall at the roundabout's centre was replaced with an electricity substation named the Michael Faraday Memorial, in honour of the local scientist who pioneered research into electricity.

In the early 1960s, the Elephant and Castle shopping centre was built, the first of its kind in Europe. This has been one of the defining aspects of the district ever since. Due to be redeveloped as part of the new town centre, it's one of the main elements of the current regeneration programme, alongside Elephant Park.

Historic people

The area has historical associations with many famous and notable people. These include the film stars Charlie Chaplin and Michael Caine; the scientists Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and John Newlands; artists, writers and poets including Thomas Middelton, Elizabeth Siddle, Samuel Palmer, George Tinworth, Robert Browning and Austin Osman Spare; the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and two Victorian pioneers in the fields of health and housing, Sarah Wardroper and Octavia Hill.

More history
A collection of articles about the fascinating history of Elephant and Castle
Local links

You can find out more about the Elephant's past at Southwark's Local History Library and Archive or online at the borough's heritage site. You can find out more about the history of Old Kent Road at oldkentroad.org.uk.

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Elephant and Castle has been an important junction since Roman times. However, it takes its name from a local pub built many centuries later. Old Kent Road and Newington Causeway, two of the main roads which converge at the Elephant, roughly follow the path of two Roman routes - Watling Street and Stane Street - which led into Londinium via an early incarnation of London Bridge.

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Elephant and Castle, Southwark

A busy road junction and its rapidly changing vicinity, situated in (and better known than) Newington, and often simply called 'the Elephant'

In 1641 John Flaxman set up a blacksmith's forge on an island site here to take advantage of the passing horse-drawn traffic. Around 1760 the smithy was converted to a tavern that displayed a sign of an elephant and castle. There is almost certainly no truth in the widely held belief that the name is a corruption of Infanta de Castilla ('Princess of Castile'). The more likely connection is with the old heraldic symbol of an elephant with a castellated tower on its back, which was especially used by the Cutlers' Company to indicate to the use of ivory in knife handles. The tavern became a coaching halt and thus gave its name to the junction.

This was already a densely built-up area by the time Charles Spurgeon established the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861. Shown at dawn in the photograph above, the tabernacle has twice been rebuilt but its original portico survives.

The mainline railway station opened in 1863. In the Victorian era the station was nicknamed 'the Animal'. † The City and South London Railway arrived nearby in 1890 and the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway added a connection in 1906.

Before the junction was overwhelmed by motor traffic, this was a locality where people came to socialise, shop and be entertained. In 1913 Désiré Pasquet observed in Londres et les Ouvriers de Londres that "South London's central edifice is a public house - the Elephant and Castle."

Following its devastation during the Second World War, the area was clumsily redeveloped from the late 1950s with offices, academic buildings, housing estates and the Elephant and Castle shopping centre - a pioneer in its time but notoriously dismal in its latter days and not improved by its garish plastic cladding. With priority given to road traffic, pedestrians were forced into a network of subways.

Notable for its three wind turbines, the Strata skyscraper was completed in 2010 and is the tallest of several residential units to have appeared nearby over the past decade. Elsewhere in the area - and stretching into Walworth - a £1.5 billion regeneration programme had been making elephantine progress - but has accelerated recently.

The most significant new developments are Oakmayne's Two Fifty One, Lend Lease Corporation's Elephant Park and Delancey's town centre redevelopment, which proposes to "replace the existing, poor quality shopping centre with a new town centre which will future-proof Elephant and Castle for the long term and provide numerous benefits for both the local and borough-wide economy". In addition, Southwark council has opened the Castle leisure centre at St Gabriel Walk, while the Artworks Elephant is a temporary 'art, work and eat hub' in repurposed shipping containers on Elephant Road.

The Elephant and Castle shopping centre closed in September 2020, to make way for "a thriving new Zone 1 destination" that will include "a range of high street and independent retailers, enhanced restaurant and leisure opportunities and a new university campus for [the] London College of Communication."

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is set in Illyria but some have taken this to be an idealised England, citing as evidence Antonio and Sebastian's decision to lodge "in the south suburbs, at the Elephant."

A shiny electrical substation in the centre of the Elephant and Castle roundabout doubles as a memorial to physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, who was born near here.

Postal districts: SE1 and SE17
Stations: Southern, Thameslink, Bakerloo line terminus, Northern line (zones 1 and 2)
Further reading: Stephen Humphrey, Elephant & Castle: A History, Amberley, 2013
Twitter: Elephant & Castle
Bing bird's view: Elephant and Castle

* The picture of the Elephant and Castle statue on this page is adapted from an original photograph, copyright Laszlo Ilyes, at Flickr, made available under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Licence. Any subsequent reuse is hereby freely permitted under the terms of that licence.
† "'Third-class Animal' is, or was, quite understood by the railway booking-clerks of the district." J Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victoria Era (1908)

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In 1641 John Flaxman set up a blacksmith's forge on an island site here to take advantage of the passing horse-drawn traffic. Around 1760 the smithy was converted to a tavern that displayed a sign of an elephant and castle.

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Formerly - The Elephant & Castle Hotel / Elephant & Castle Estate

The much reviled Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre which opened in 1965 was built on the bomb damaged site of the former Elephant & Castle Estate, originally constructed in 1898. The Building stood almost next door to the former Elephant and Castle Theatre which first opened on the 31st of May 1879 and is today known as the Coronet Theatre.

The Building News & Engineering Journal reported on the proposed Elephant & Castle Estate building in their January the 21st 1898 edition, along with the sketch shown above, saying:- 'This block of buildings is designed to cover the site of the present Elephant and Castle Hotel, together with the shops adjoining. The estate forms an island, which is well known, and is in a very conspicuous position, the headway facing the north, and having a frontage to Newington Butts and Walworth-road of about 80ft., and an average width of 34ft. will be occupied by the new hotel.

The ground floor of the hotel is divided into saloon, luncheon, private and public bars, and the basement has a three-table billiard-room and cellarage accommodation. On the first floor are a double table billiard-room and large dining-room; on the second and third floor fourteen bedrooms and two large sitting-rooms, and on the top floor kitchen and domestic offices and four bedrooms. There is a separate staircase to domestic part.

The other part of the site, which also has about an 80ft. frontage to Newington Butts and Walworth-road, and an average width of about 42ft., and return frontage to Short-street, consists of nine lock-up shops on the ground floor, with basements. The first floor is approached by a fireproof staircase from Newington Butts, and is designed for three suites of offices. The three upper floors have a fireproof staircase, approached from Walworth-road, and planned for eight separate suites of residential flats.

The whole of the floors will be of fireproof construction, and the drainage and sanitary arrangements are to be carried out in the most modern manner, and the whole block lighted by electricity. All elevations are to be faced with cut and gauged red bricks and Portland stone dressings. All columns and piers to the ground floor will be granite, and the facia and cornices to the hotel part will also be of granite. The dome and two smaller turrets will have copper roofs; the sign "Elephant and Castle" will also be gilded copper. Other portions of the roof will be covered with Westmoreland green slates. Mr. H. L. Holloway, of Deptford, is the builder, and the amount of his contract is £36,000. The architect is Mr. John Farrer, of 20, Finsbury-pavement, E.C.'
The above text in quotes was first published in the Building News & Engineering Journal, January the 21st 1898.
The building was damaged by bombs during the war, along with much of the area around it, and in 1965 the new Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre opened on the site, see details below.

An article from the Illustrated London News of April the 3rd 1965 on the opening of the then new Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre

Londoners get new shopping centre at Elephant & Castle

A three-storey shopping arcade, the latest part of the giant Elephant and Castle rebuilding scheme, was opened last week by Mr. Ray Gunter. Minister of Labour. After he had unveiled a bronze statue of an elephant carrying a castle on its back, taken from an old public house which is now demolished, South London shoppers soon thronged the 115 stores, many of them taken by local traders, lining the covered courts. The top floor is roofed with glass, which can be drawn back in sunny weather to provide an open-air concourse. Part of the attraction of this £21 million scheme is that shoppers are moved from the noisy, dangerous traffic circling one of London's busiest roundabouts. The G.L.C. hope that the new Elephant and Castle, once completed, will become the shopping, business and recreation centre for South London.

The Elephant and Castle area is currently undergoing major redevelopment, eventually the site will be unrecognisable and the much disliked shopping centre will finally be gone. A website featuring all the details and dates for the regeneration can be found here.

Other Pages that may be of Interest

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The much reviled Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre which opened in 1965 was built on the bomb damaged site of the former Elephant & Castle Estate, originally constructed in 1898. The Building stood almost next door to the former Elephant and Castle Theatre which first opened on the 31st of May 1879 and is today known as the Coronet Theatre.

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When Amal had stopped crying, she apologised. "I wake up so sick, you know? I have to go to study but I feel so sick." A victim of domestic violence and now a single mother, she lives with her three young children in grimy temporary accommodation in Tooting, south London. She was telling me that Wandsworth council, which has a legal obligation to house the family, tried sending them to a rented flat on the outskirts of Newcastle, then suggested West Bromwich. She'd never heard of either place. "I said to them, 'I already told you, I have a job interview in London, I am studying in London, my children are at school in London, my ex-husband visits every week to help with the children.'"

West Bromwich, the council insisted, was her last chance. Otherwise she would be declared "intentionally homeless", and be put out with her young children on the street. "They said, 'just one option: West Bromwich.' If I said no, they wouldn't give me another chance."

This was one London council's response to the housing crisis - to spend £5m on properties for their poorer families, hundreds of miles away, while across the borough, the Meccano scaffolds rose up for the £15bn development of Nine Elms, where most flats will cost more than £1m.

The same year I met Amal, in 2014, on the other side of London the now notorious Focus E15 Mums were stepping up their campaign to remain in the city where they'd been born. "Nine billion pounds on the Olympics and they're telling us and our babies we have to go live in Hastings," lamented 19-year-old Adora Chilaisha during their occupation of East Thames housing association offices, as the hokey cokey played out in the background. "There's no way I'm going anywhere," she said. "My boy Desean is one, and I don't want him to grow up away from his family, from his home. I don't know anyone in Hastings."

Two years later, both Amal and Adora and their children are still in London after a long and exhausting struggle against the authorities to simply stay where they are. Meanwhile, those same authorities prostrate themselves before luxury property developers, Chinese business conglomerates and buy-to-let rentiers.

Opposition to gentrification is rapidly becoming less marginal, and more organised

Gentrification is an intensely emotive issue with almost endless potential for argument. That shouldn't be in the least bit surprising - it speaks to fundamental questions of home, identity and community, how those places define us, and how we define them. The process of displacement of society's poorest members is, of course, not a new thing. You can trace it back centuries, to a time when there was a literal gentry responsible for social cleansing; when the bailiffs were on horseback and "artisanal" was a descriptor of a pre-industrial social class, rather than vogueish hipster branding.

Nonetheless, there is something of the zeitgeist about gentrification. Until a few years ago, only academic geographers and housing campaigners used the term. In recent years, however, the subject has entered the mainstream, and the word has become increasingly ubiquitous in what seems like almost every city across the world. But it is not only the debate that has intensified: opposition to gentrification is rapidly becoming less marginal, and more organised. While it is easy to locate historical rent strikes and neighbourhood uprisings to what you might call gentrification avant la lettre, for the first time, gentrification itself is a serious point of political contention - and resistance.

The tipping point in the UK came last autumn, when members of Class War's so-called Fuck Parade, flaming torches in hand, daubed "SCUM" on the windows of east London's quintessential hipster cafe, Cereal Killer. The restaurant was already castigated by Channel Four News for serving £4 bowls of cereal in a borough in which thousands of poor families can't afford to feed their children. Although several people, myself included, argued that the bearded cereal entrepreneurs were hardly gentrification's true villains, the news was reported around the world - not just as a riot that launched a thousand hot takes, but as the expression of a rising tide of anger. The issue had leaped into the mainstream.

Last month, the pre-Christmas episode of This American Life featured an astonishing segment about a San Francisco dad going to see his six-year-old daughter in her school play, and discovering that the entire show was a fierce polemic against the malign influence of tech companies making the city "a sterile playground for the rich". The play culminates in a huge demonstration outside city hall, with the young children holding placards reading "resistance = love of community" and singing that the city is not for sale.

So why now? The short answer is demand and supply: demand for well-positioned urban space is higher than ever, while the supply of housing options for the urban poor, and the strength and willingness of the state to provide them, is weaker than in decades. In urban policy, we are witnessing the triumph of the market and the capitulation of the state. If an area becomes desirable to those with money - regardless if it was hitherto undesirable or dominated by public housing - then sooner or later, the wealthy will get what they want. "The problem," said Yolande Barthes from Savills estate agents at a Guardian Live debate last month, "is the area of London that people want to live in hasn't expanded at the same rate as the population."

As London's affordable housing crisis deepens - spurred by the collapse of new social housing construction, and the sale of hundreds of thousands more social flats under right-to-buy - the galvanisation of the British capital's local communities has been astonishing. This customised Google Map, created by Action East End, drops pins on the map for each hyper-local campaign. From Save Chrisp Street Market in the east to Save Portobello Road Market in the west, the campaigns - many formed only in the last year - range from demands to protect existing social housing, to protests against new luxury flat developments or against the destruction of community assets such as much-loved markets, nurseries, pubs and small businesses. At the time of writing, there are 53 different campaigns.

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Focus E15 Mums fought eviction from the Carpenters Estate. Photograph: Jess Hurd/Guardian

One is Reclaim Brixton, who formed in March 2015 in opposition to the rapidly accelerating gentrification of the south London area. Co-founder Cyndi Anafo's mother used to run a Ghanaian grocery in the covered market that has recently been rebranded Brixton Village, a target destination for food tourists and wealthy Londoners. Via social media, Anafo and friends arranged meetings, leading to a carnival-cum-demonstration in Brixton town centre that drew thousands and attracted widespread national media attention. "For about 20 years it's been on the edge of gentrification," Anafo says. "But the last five or six years it's all come to the fore - Reclaim Brixton came about chiefly through frustration."

'Middle-aged, middle-class dinosaurs ... determined to keep London shitty'

Giles Coren on anti-gentrifiers

While the transformation of Brixton is visible in the proliferation of more expensive shops, bars and restaurants, and the influx of a non-resident, affluent demographic visiting places like Champagne + Fromage, Anafo is clear that the cultural and commercial changes are not the main event. "It all comes down to housing," she says. "Being a kind of 'accidental activist', and getting to know all the existing housing groups, made me realise the severity of the situation on the ground in Brixton, meeting people who are on eviction lists. People moan about particular types of businesses or shops, or estate agents like Foxtons, but my feeling is that rent stabilisation is something that could help everyone."

Last June, Berlin made headlines when it began enforcing rent controls for all, limiting landlords to charging new tenants more than 10% above the local average. The previous year rents had gone up by more than 9%. "We don't want a situation like in London or Paris," said Reiner Wild of the Berlin Tenants' Association. Such strident legislation to protect poorer citizens does not just drop out of the sky, of course. It emerges from a history of equally robust civic campaigning on housing, gentrification and the right to the city.

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The Tacheles in Berlin was formed in the 1990s as a squat by artists seeking to save the building from demolition. It closed in 2012. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty

Nottingham University geographer Alex Vasudevan, author of a recent book on the subject, Metropolitan Preoccupations, says Berlin is in a sense diametrically different from London - it's a very poor city, where wages are one-third lower than its western German neighbours. "In the wake of unification Berlin has seen waves of gentrification, while remaining very poor by German standards," says Vasudevan. "Before the fall of the wall, there were subsidies given to squatters to renovate buildings, and they would be legalised as a result - a kind of compromise. But that programme ended in 2002, and since the wall came down Berlin has become this laboratory of neoliberal urban governance."

The architects of gentrification are extremely careful not to talk about it

As in London, Vasudevan says, funding for social housing collapsed, and simultaneously thousands of what used to be social housing properties were privatised. "Berlin tried to become a financial centre. It failed. So then they went with the whole 'creative city' agenda, or at least a version of it, connected with touristification and this kind of 'Airbnb urbanism'. There's a great Aibrnb map of Kreuzberg: until recently there was only one property in that neighbourhood that was available on the normal rental market - everything else was Airbnb."

Grassroots resistance in Berlin has revolved mostly around "very local geographies", such as saving one particular building, park, housing project, or even fighting the eviction of a much-loved Turkish grocery store. Nonetheless, Vasudevan explains that each victory has galvanised the city as a whole, and made gentrification even more of a common talking point than it is in London. The challenge now has been scaling up, making connections, and sharing information between neighbourhoods, and even internationally.

"They've managed to get the rent cap by just being incredibly well-organised, and absolutely dogged - and they are also good at talking to each other. You have local working-class Germans who remained in Kreuzberg, and Turkish migrants collaborating; so everything is written in both German and Turkish, they're all networked."

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The gigantic crocheted tribute to Wes Anderson which appeared at Bushwick Flea Market in Brooklyn. Photograph: London Kaye

They're also talking to the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Spain, the grassroots group whose phenomenal success of blocking thousands of evictions propelled its spokeswoman, Ada Colau, to become mayor of Barcelona. Spain's housing crisis has been so destructive that the PAH's use of community self-organisation and support, and direct action to block evictions, has been copied across the world. I've seen Spanish parents in tears in PAH meetings, being comforted by their foreign-born (often Latin American) neighbours, before rallying to take on the banks trying to evict them. I've also seen Sí Se Puede, the PAH documentary, screened to housing activists in London. The international sharing of both tactics and inspiration highlights globalisation's double-edged sword: property developers and investors may be operating simultaneously in Berlin, London and Barcelona, but the people resisting gentrification in these cities are beginning to network themselves, too.

What remains to be seen is whether campaigning against gentrification will grow into any city-wide protests. Certainly, the "G" word has been tapped as the new culprit for a lot of urban tensions emerging from the influx of younger, whiter, wealthier people into city cores. After a "yarn-bombing" artist, with the support of the hipster Bushwick Flea market, put up a 15ft crochet homage to Wes Anderson on the exterior wall of his family home in Bushwick without asking for permission, New Yorker Will Giron wrote: "Gentrification has gotten to the point where every time I see a group of young white millennials in the hood my heart starts racing and a sense of anxiety starts falling over me."

***

The argument that gentrification represents a kind of urban neocolonialism is hard to miss. Spike Lee made it clear with his viral rant against "Christopher Columbus syndrome" in Brooklyn. Indeed, after decades of "white flight" to the US suburbs, since 2010 American cities have seen increases in white populations. Protests in 2014 targeted Microsoft's corporate shuttle buses in Seattle; not only did they raise rents, went the argument, they didn't integrate, adding to social tensions in a city where working-class African-Americans were being pushed out. That same year, a video went viral of (older, whiter) Dropbox employees trying to get rid of mostly Latino young people from a football pitch in San Francisco's Mission district. (The Latinos protested, and won.)

It is surely the higher-profile, less sensitive invasions that get the headlines, but they speak to a deeper malaise of newly arriving communities with no interest in connecting with the existing populations they are displacing. "Don't let the door hit you on the way out," they seem to say.

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Gentrification X: how an academic argument became the people's protest

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In the first of a special series on the impact of gentrification on cities around the world, Dan Hancox meets victims and beneficiaries of this highly emotive issue - and finds that the anger is real, and resistance is coming to a head

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Gentrification is rapidly reshaping many cities across the United States, including Texas, displacing vulnerable residents and changing the cultural character of communities.

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Heyate Estate Tenants Displacement Map - Google My Maps

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Map showing displacement of Heygate estate tenants following 'decant' in 2007-2009.

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Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

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Making his mark: Lisbon street artist Vhils

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Artist Sol Calero Goes Travelling in Latin America | TateShots

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Mapped: Every regeneration project in Elephant and Castle - including housing, community facilities, education, culture and retail.

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I decided to do some more research on what gentrification was exactly to get a broader understanding of exactly HOW it effects and displaces communities. I understand better that it is more of a byproduct of development and will just happen naturally.

I wonder if archives held more stories from the people on the receiving end of gentrification there may be a more thoughtful approach to understanding it. However, archives are held by those who are in power. I think it is important that whilst information derived from Delancy, Lend-Lease (developers) etc is out there, there should also be archived information, and stories who are effected by it.

With coming up with ideas I used my research to figure out what kind of information I wanted to put out there.

I quite like

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Bringing diverse communities together and increasing awareness and use of public spaces

Strengthening the case for London's Latin Quarter in Elephant and Castle
Organising multimedia and participatory workshops, exhibitions, walking tours and festivals

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Bringing diverse communities together and increasing awareness and use of public spaces Strengthening the case for London's Latin Quarter in Elephant and Castle Organising multimedia and participatory workshops, exhibitions, walking tours and festivals

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" Delancey's plans amount to nothing more than an ethnic cleansing of Elephant and Castle.

In addition to the Shopping Centre, the development plans have specifically chosen to demolish the two railway arches on Elephant Road operated by Colombian business owners.

Arch number 6 on Elephant Road, which will be demolished, is home to "Distriandina" ("The Colombian"), which is the oldest Colombian venue in London. For over 20 years, it has been providing Londoners with Latin American food, music and dance and has become a landmark of Latino immigrants in the city. The venue has been a pioneer for Latin businesses in London, helping to create a cluster of South American businesses around Elephant and Castle.

“Distriandina” operates more as a community hub than as a business, providing free Salsa classes to children, serving as the home for moments of Colombian celebration, such as World Cup matches and Colombian Independence day, as well as being a socialisation space for BAME communities, who we support with affordable £1 coffee and food.

“Distriandina’s” status as a valuable pillar of the Latin American community in London is something which our city cannot afford to lose. We understand that the area needs to be redeveloped to allow for the construction of new homes, but we feel that Delancey’s plans, which specifically target Latin businesses, are not the way forward.

William Daza, London, ENG, United Kingdom "

comment via: https://www.change.org/p/sadiq-khan-sadiq-say-no-to-the-displacement-of-bame-communities-from-elephant-castle/c/737719839

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Thinking about my experience with Elephant and Castle itself

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Thinking about my experience with Elephant and Castle itself

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I have been to Elephant and castle many times before moving to London and found it strangely a hostile place. Giant roads of traffic in every direction - concrete sprawls of pavement leading to no where. Nothing much stood out to me that was inviting. It was more I was going there for a reason rather than passing through for a fantastic atmosphere. I feel from the outside you can see why this place may be in need to re doing however little did I know there was a lot going on in that area that I just didn't recognise or know about.

Coming back there on my walk for some research for my group I could appreciate and take more time looking at the architecture, walking into the small independent shops. I noticed that although it was a very hustle and bustle place where everything and everyone was moving, there were places where people would just hang out and chat within their own shops.

At a first glance I thought the new plans actually look nice - who wouldn't want some lovely green space? But at what cost is this for? Who is benefiting from it? Displacing people and breaking up communities is not a good reason for not including the thoughts and feelings of how exactly regeneration will effect minority and lower income people.

Developing for the sake of money not for the local people.

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Beautifully illustrated map with quotes of people

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Beautifully illustrated map with quotes of people

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illustrations by LUISE VORMITTAG.

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The Elephant & Castle neighbourhood in London is well known as the biggest centre of the Latin American community in the UK. There are around 150 Latin American and minority ethnic businesses in the area. The Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, where many of these businesses are located, has not seen any significant investment in recent years and is in a critical state of disrepair. An extensive and highly controversial proposal for the redevelopment of the site is likely to result in the current Shopping Centre and the surrounding structures, including an outdoor market and two railway arches being destroyed or cleared.

Latin Elephant are campaigning for the interests of the small traders working in the buildings currently under threat. Many of these traders cater specifically to the Latin American community. The redevelopment plan for the site does not provide sufficient measures to enable them to continue trading here. Latin Elephant predict that the current plans will lead to a collapse of many of these businesses, which in turn would rob the community of their vital touchpoints.

In Walking the Elephant, Latin Elephant and I sought to capture what is at stake: a lively, public space that caters to and creates community. External visitors to Elephant & Castle have a visual experience that is dominated by the timeworn materiality of the physical space. In contrast to this I wanted to draw attention to the mental image of local residents, populated with associated stories, memories and experiences.

El barrio de Elephant & Castle en Londres es bien conocido por ser el epicentro de la comunidad latinoamericana en el Reino Unido. Hay alrededor de 150 comercios latinoamericanos y de minorías étnicas en el área. El centro comercial de Elephant & Castle, donde se encuentran muchas de estos comerciantes, no ha visto ninguna inversión significativa en los últimos años y se encuentra en un estado crítico. Es probable que un proyecto de desarrollo muy controvertido resulte en el cierre y potencial demolición del centro comercial actual y las estructuras circundantes, incluido un mercado al aire libre y dos arcos.

Latin Elephant hace campaña por los intereses de los pequeños comerciantes que trabajan en esta área y que se encuentran amenazados. Muchos de estos comerciantes atienden específicamente a la comunidad latinoamericana. El plan de redesarrollo para el sitio no parece suficiente para permitirles continuar con el comercio aquí. Latin Elephant predice que los planes actuales conducirán al desplazamiento de muchos locales, lo que a su vez quitaría a la comunidad sus puntos de contacto vitales.

En Walking the Elephant / Recorriendo Elephant, Latin Elephant y yo tratamos de capturar lo que está en juego: un espacio público y animado que abastece y genera comunidad. Los visitantes externos a Elephant & Castle tienen una experiencia visual que está dominada por la materialidad desgastada por el tiempo del espacio físico. En contraste con esto, quería llamar la atención sobre la imagen mental de los residentes locales, poblada con historias, recuerdos y experiencias asociadas.

- Luise Vormittag, 2019

During the summer of 2017 Latin Elephant and Luise Vormittag held a number of workshops in and around Elephant & Castle. Local residents were invited to note down their habitual routes and personal experiences on two collectively produced local maps. The animated illustration 'ENTER' above shows a reimagined, version of 'The Elephant', drawn from the multiplicity of perspectives contained in these maps.

En el verano 2017 Latin Elephant y Luise Vormittag organizaron unos talleres dentro y alrededor de Elephant & Castle. Residentes locales fueron invitados a anotar sus rutas habituales y experiencias personales en dos mapas locales colectivos. La illustración animada 'ENTRAR' de arriba muestra una versión de 'Elephant' reimaginado, basado en las múltiples perspectivas contenido en estos mapas.

Our heritage is evident in our feet. The beauty of our people in our smile. We are Latinos and this is our home. We have danced in Elephant many times, we are a family, the family 'Talentos'. We would love to preserve the Elephant and continue to have it as the centre of our community. Let's defend our spaces. 'Talentos' on the move!

En nuestos pies se muestra nuestra herencia. En nuestra sonrisa la alegria de nuestra gente. Somos Latinos y esta es nuestra casa. Bailamos en Elephant muchas veces, somos familia, la familia 'Talentos'. Nos gustaria se preservara y continuara Elephant como centro de nuestra comunidad. Defendamos nuestro espacio!!! 'Talentos' te mueve!!!

➘ All illustrations © Luise Vormittag. Illustraciones © Luise Vormittag.

➘ Names of participants / Nombres de los participantes: Hazelle I Clark, Diego Ehereny, Macarena Gajardo, Jael García, Ever Guttierrez, Gerald B Leakey, David McEwen, English Ninja, Edison Ortega, Santiago Peluffo, Julio Rodas, Janet Yaták, Tracey Browne, Marek, Elizabeth, Carolin Hohenegger, Cheryl Downes, Naomie Abraham, Tina Kacici, R Chen, Jon Fitzgerald, Andrea Greenwood, Mike Kear, Julian Adamoli, Gareth Morris, Corrina Eastwood, Charlie Smith, Susan Vericat, Richard Reynolds, Lyla Patel (& Zoya and Cyra), Herman H. Lopez and four further participants who prefer to remain anonymous.

➘ Walking the Elephant is published via 3 pamphlets as well as online. © all participants listed / Luise Vormittag / Latin Elephant, 2019. Recorriendo Elephant esta publicado a través de 3 folletos y en línea. © todos participantes mencionados / Luise Vormittag / Latin Elephant, 2019.

➘ Graphic design and web development by See, Also for Latin Elephant. Página web creada por See, Also para Latin Elephant.

➘ Part of Walking the Elephant / Recorriendo Elephant © Latin Elephant, 2019.

➘ Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, New Kent Road, London SE1 6TE, UK.

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The Elephant & Castle neighbourhood in London is well known as the biggest centre of the Latin American community in the UK. There are around 150 Latin American and minority ethnic businesses in the area. The Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, where many of these businesses are located, has not seen any significant investment in recent years and is in a critical state of disrepair.

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Food and Gentrification

Pelin Keskin and Hudda Khaireh
Interview by Sofia Niazi
Illustrations by Olivia Twist

As the London neighbourhoods we grew up in transform beyond recognition to make way for new residents and audiences, we take a step back to assess the damage. We catch up with researcher and curator Hudda Khaireh and food journalist Pelin Keskin for a frank conversation about food, class and encroachment.

What were the food landscapes in your local area like growing up?

Pelin: We always had two different locations for grocery shopping: the British supermarket and the Turkish one. The Turkish Food Centre in Dalston was central to my upbringing, and when we moved to Walthamstow it became the International Supermarket and Walthamstow High Street Market. Whenever we ate out as a family or if my dad wanted baklava we'd always go to a restaurant in Dalston. Mainly, I remember my parents going from place to place just to try and get the best value for money.

Hudda: Growing up in South London we did our weekly shop at Sainsbury's or the Co-op in Croydon and got our halal meat, fruit and veg on London Road. We moved to West Norwood in the mid '90s and for halal meat, fruit and veg we went to Brixton Market and used the poundshop for toiletries and cleaning products. My dad would go to the Somali shops in Streatham weekly to get treats like xalwa and bottles of Shaani, and he'd also bulk buy Italian pasta because it was nicer than the supermarket stuff.

How have these food landscapes changed?

Pelin: I feel a certain pride knowing that restaurants I grew up with in Dalston are still standing despite changes to the neighborhood. We still go to Dalston for family meals because (despite my best efforts) my parents only see value in spending restaurant money on shish kebab. Walthamstow High Street is still going strong, despite the new renovations around the tube/overground station. The biggest change I've noticed in the last few years, in being the last stop on the northbound Victoria line, is that more and more white people stay on till the end of the line. Most would used to get off at Finsbury Park and change to the Piccadilly line. Then it became Blackhorse Road station. Now they get off where I do, at the end of the line.

Hudda: Brixton is wild to me because it never had any supermarkets except for the big Tesco on Acre Lane but now the Carpet Right is a big Sainsbury's, and there are plenty of Sainsbury's Locals and Tesco Expresses even in dead places like Vassell and Herne Hill. We have new Brazilian-Polish food stores, the obligatory Polski Skelp and a few Portuguese cafe/restaurants but if you know South then you'll know that's not a big deal in terms of change. Lambeth Council has supported these borough-wide bougie monthly French Farmers' Markets and artisanal blah blah stuff and West Norwood has been hit especially hard. One door down from Morley's Chicken, previously the Internet cafe/IT repair shop, there is now a place that sells craft beer. There is a surplus of independent coffee shops now and even a Costa which blows me away.

There's been plenty of hype this year over chicken shops. What is the attraction to 'poor people' food? How do you understand that process of fetishisation?

Pelin: It's a metropolitan version of "Wow, can you believe these tribes eat bugs? I'm going to eat them too!" Everyone thinks they're Bear Grylls. They're fascinated by poor (and foreign) people's food because it's 'fun'. For many, it's an anthropological experience rather than a socioeconomic reality. The spike in popularity will wane. These people get disgusted by chicken bones in boxes at the back of the bus- they can't survive. Someone will create a more palatable gourmet version in Soho with an on-the-nose Instagrammable aesthetic.

Hudda: I agree with Pelin in that it's mostly voyeuristic. But for me this isn't about 'poor people' food. No one is doing this over cheese and onion pasties from Greggs or fish and chips. Fried chicken is culturally synonymous with black people.

Pelin: Absolutely.

Hudda: Everyone from the ends eats fried chicken. My local chicken shop resembles an elderly day-care centre on weekdays especially in light of all the cuts to social welfare provisions like Meals-on-Wheels. Nonetheless, chicken shops are synonymous, and therefore infamous, as a result of their association with black school children. When Elijah Quashie started the genius web-series that is the 'Pengest Munch' and people on Twitter started hyping it and Quashie got love from all those culture vultures it followed the same trajectory of so much black cultural production.

What role do you think trendy cafes and restaurants play in encroaching on working-class areas? How would you describe the relationship between food and class?

Pelin: For immigrants, opening a cafe or a restaurant is often about creating a foothold to survive in a new country and a sense of home in a strange place. The bittersweet reality of a city like London is, is that if we have our landscapes, neighbourhoods and bubbles, it follows that so do privileged people. The difference is they can move into our bubble but we can't move into theirs. Their landscape is impenetrable whereas ours looks like cheap rent. They can copy us but we can't copy them. Someone with a social sciences degree who doesn't want to work in a boring office and decides to be their own boss can set up a restaurant selling our food to a white clientele. What you end up with are places like Le Bab or Black Axe Mangal - places that profit from displacing a cuisine from its context in this country while being lauded for 'reinvigorating' it.

Hudda: The types of food we eat, our access to it, and how society receives our food 'customs' are not outside the social structures we live in. Class is one way of understanding these power dynamics and I want to talk to it, but I'm black, I live in London, apparently I'm working class too but my experience of space, of being intimidated and how the food, the people what nurtured me into what I am, is not one that can be explained under the rubric of 'class'. The late Stuart Hall wrote: 'I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth [...] That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history'.
Hall is someone I think through, with, and against when I come to these questions of class. When he says 'I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea', it locates the issues we're trying to unpack in a different language, texture and register to class. The English are a class, separate to and already formed in contra-distinction to the enslaved African on the plantation. Conquest and slavery made this babylon, including our modern day food cultures. There is no cafe culture or even concepts of 'fine dining' without it. Pelin spoke to the reality that thousands of restaurants and cafes in the UK are run by immigrants, to sustain their home cultures and communities, of course, but also because British people have long had a hunger for food from foreign climes and have been more comfortable seeing foreigners serving them than doing anything else.

Pelin: That inevitable sense of superiority is rooted into the psyche. It manifests itself domestically with increasing ease because you don't need to get on a ship and sail across the seas to satisfy that urge and validate those feelings.

Hudda: I really feel what you say, Pelin, that the difference is they can copy us but we can't copy them - that they can move into our bubble but their bubble is impenetrable. Not that the issue here is reciprocity. For me it speaks to the various degrees of captivity some of us are required to live in, compared to the absolute freedom to be complete begs that certain demographics run on. Gentrification is and hides a story of power - who has the power of movement and who has the power to decide what is of value in the first place.

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As the London neighbourhoods we grew up in transform beyond recognition to make way for new residents and audiences, we take a step back to assess the damage. We catch up with researcher and curator Hudda Khaireh and food journalist Pelin Keskin for a frank conversation about food, class and encroachment.

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Elephant and Castle Virtual Community Hub

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TThe Elephant & Castle Virtual Community Hub launched in March 2020. It hosts free virtual wellness activities, fitness classes and arts & crafts workshops for local people.

We know that keeping the mind and body active is essential while you are in self-isolation so we have brought a host of wellness, fitness and arts & crafts activities online.

You can now access our timetable of activities from the comfort of your home. It also features information on the essential services that are available in the local area.

What's happening?
Check out our list of activities below that you can get involved in this week:

If there is a class or activity you feel would benefit the community and would like to see streamed or you would like to offer a class to the community, please...
Let us know

Community Aid and Information

In these difficult times we will keep a list up to date of all services which are available in the community to help you through this. We've included a list of the community aid happening in Elephant and Castle:

1. Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK is a group of volunteers supporting local community groups organising mutual aid throughout the Covid-19 outbreak in the UK. They focus on providing resources and connecting people to their nearest local groups, willing volunteers and those in need. To find the local groups in your area click here

2. The Elephant and Castle Town Centre project team is keeping informed of forthcoming activities and progress on the development of Elephant and Castle Town Centre. This provides an opportunity to meet with members of the project team, discuss the works programme in more detail and ask any questions that you may have. The next Neighbourhood Information Forum is schedules for Tuesday 02nd February 2021 at 18.30. If you would like to attend the Neighbourhood Information Forum and/or receive monthly calendar notifications, please email info@elephantandcastletowncentre.co.uk to sign up!

3. LOCAL SUPERMARKETS
Click here to find out where the closest supermarkets are located to the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and which are still open.

4. COVID-19 support organisations and contact details:

SAMARITANS - Provides confidential, non-judgemental emotional support for people experiencing feelings of distress or despair. You can phone, email, write a letter or in most cases talk to someone face to face.

Telephone: 116 123 (24 hours a day, free of charge)

AGE UK Advice Line0800 678 1602

Free to call 8am - 7pm 365 days a year

Advice on services for the elderly including Care and Support, Money and Legal, Health and Wellbeing, Coronavirus, Healthy eating, Keeping Well in Winter, Benefits and Entitlements.

The Trussell Trust support a nationwide network of food banks and together we provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty.

To find a food bank near you please see the link below:

5. LOCAL PHARMACIES
Click here to find out where the closest pharmacies are located to the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and which are still open.

6. During this difficult period with the ongoing situation around COVID-19, we are encouraging all our contractors to assist the local communities in which we operate. As a result of this the Elephant and Castle Town Centre project team through Multiplex have already provided over 30,000 items of PPE to help assist the nation's frontline essential workers within the borough. Supported by its fantastic supply chain, the team has provided masks, glasses, gloves, overshoes, overalls, hand sanitiser, wipes and surface spray.

7. Co-Op in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre now has a dedicated shopping hour for people who are at higher risk or elderly (Mon-Sat 9-10am & Sun 10-11am).

8. Fare Share is the UK's national network of charitable food redistributors, made up of 17 charitable food organisations. Fare Share takes good quality surplus food from right across the food industry and redistribute it to almost 11,000 frontline charities and community groups. For further details on how to get help or volunteer please click here.

9. Trussell Trust support a nationwide network of food banks and together they provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty, and campaign for change to end the need for food banks in the UK. Click here to find out where to access local foodbanks or if you would like to offer your help.

How you can help

Even just a friendly chat can really help

For those interested on how, when and where you can help vulnerable people in your local community, whether it be by donating tinned goods to a local food bank, offering to take your neighbours dog for a walk while they are stuck indoors, or just simply lending a listening ear to someone who would just like to chat.
If you have information that you would like us to share on how to further aid our local community or if you would like to offer your support in some way, please... Let us know

Gallery

Take a look at all of the activities and events that has happened in the Elephant and Castle Community Hub since June 2019

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Home - Elephant and Castle Virtual Community Hub

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TThe Elephant & Castle Virtual Community Hub launched in March 2020. It hosts free virtual wellness activities, fitness classes and arts & crafts workshops for local people. We know that keeping the mind and body active is essential while you are in self-isolation so we have brought a host of wellness, fitness and arts & crafts activities online.

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Map Illustrators

Without the thought-provoking and artful work of the map illustrator, we'd be lost much of the time. To show us the way, map illustrators chart a course, highlighting landmarks and attractions along a route in a style that emphasizes the hand-drawn quality of mapping.
Map illustrators often take the high road showing us the view from above: from an aerial or oblique perspective. They bring landscape and historic highlights and street patterns into view.
Whether depicting the attractions of a tourist town, penning a colorful map of a local zoo, or delineating a color-coded city map, map illustrators usually sprinkle their maps with drawings and sketches known as icons.
With the same spirit of adventure as the world's great explorers like Vasco de Gama, Ponce de León, and Marco Polo, map illustrators illuminate the road less traveled, finding a happy confluence point between the known and unknown.
While not always an accurate rendition of distances between attractions, map illustrators often use pictorial landmarks to gauge location and distance.
A broad spectrum of styles and techniques are represented in the work of map illustrators. They label items on their maps with appropriate type and symbols not only to designate attractions but to create a feeling. Map illustrators design icons and a map legend to assist in reading their maps.
The innate charm of map illustration lies in the "hand-made" quality of a one-of-a-kind design. Only an illustrated map will take you to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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Map Illustrators | Anna Goodson Illustration Agency

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Without the thought-provoking and artful work of the map illustrator, we'd be lost much of the time. To show us the way, map illustrators chart a course, highlighting landmarks and attractions along a route in a style that emphasizes the hand-drawn quality of mapping. Map illustrators often take the high road showing us the view [...]

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Taking a turn off East Street to reach Sokari Douglas Camp's live-work studios, you leave behind one kind of street theatre, comprising stallholders and shoppers, only to enter another, this time made-up of large metal figures; static and yet, somehow, every bit as animated.

Literally skipping out of her home-cum-workshop, Sokari is certainly animated herself. Warm and welcoming; her boundless enthusiasm and giddiness belies her 62 years.

Once inside the building (which was designed and built by her architect husband, Alan Camp) you're immediately struck by an array of sights which represent different aspects of Sokari's life.

A spiral staircase, guarded by a life-size, steel palm tree, dominates the scene - climbing three floors up to the broad glass ceiling. Giant steel sculptures of various characters form a kind of reception committee, while a number of portraits, painted by her two daughters, add an additional, family touch.

The metal figures - which sit at the heart of much of Sokari's work - take inspiration from her Nigerian roots, her Kalabari heritage and life in Britain and Elephant and Castle.

Sokari's work appears in the permanent collection at the British Museum, as well as in galleries in Washington, Tokyo and elsewhere. She has had several local, national and international exhibitions; was shortlisted for Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth in 2003 and received a CBE in recognition of her services to art in 2005.

In the summer of 2020, the role of sculpture and statues in public life came under intense scrutiny.

With protests against the memorialising of slave traders and others, led by the Black Lives Matter movement, more people began to ask questions about who gets represented in British art and how and why.

Indeed, the council's Southwark Stands Together initiative has already undertaken an audit of civic art and local place names as part of a broader mission to tackle racism and inequality in the borough.

"The more BLM grows, the more my statues are the kind of stuff I'd like to come across when I go for a walk in Elephant and Castle" says Sokari. "Maybe in one of the many new developments being built" she smiles.

Statues are powerful. They affect you. I should know.

"We're at a crossroads in the national conversation about our history and, rather than adding more blue plaques, I'd rather see a huge, fat sculpture that would stop you in your tracks." Sokari moved to Elephant and Castle in 1988 and, unlikely as it sounds, she came for the steel.

Sokari had fallen in love with the material while studying at art college. She found the best place to buy it was from Thomas Tingley, who had a factory on Brandon Street, just around the corner from where she lives now.

"Back then, Alan and I were looking for a warehouse to share with friends and this site, near Tingley's, was empty" explains Sokari.

"I had a relative, in Camberwell, who said Elephant and Castle has fantastic connections. It's central; you're not far from the river; Westminster is just 15 minutes away and Burgess Park had really taken shape by then, too."

"To begin with, we'd visit and we'd get lost. It was the end of the Bakerloo line and we didn't really know where we were. But after a while, it became apparent that the end of the line was actually the beginning of the line for us."

Sokari's own personal line begins in Buguma, Rivers State, Nigeria.

Born the daughter of a chief, she was brought up by an English anthropologist, Robin Horton who had married her elder sister.

"It was tragedy that gave me the luck I had" says Sokari.

"My sister died in childbirth and they lost their twins too. Robin was distraught and so, to keep himself together, he stayed with the family and asked that he might bring me up because I was living with them at the time."

That early, anthropological influence - a curiosity about how we look at people, society and culture - has become one of the mainstays of Sokari's work, alongside a desire to address injustice.

Her piece, Green Leaf Barrel (2014) was inspired by the struggles of people living in the Niger Delta, facing mounting unemployment as well as terrible pollution. Another piece, a full-scale replica of a bus - Ken Saro-Wiwa Living Memorial Bus - honours the life of the famous writer and environmentalist who was executed by Nigeria's military government in 1995.

Her collection of six sculptures, entitled All the World is Now Richer, addresses themes of slavery, evolution and change, and is currently exhibited in Parliament.

Sokari is alive to the change and evolution taking place in her own neighbourhood too.

She laments the loss of the Heygate estate ("it had the best views in London") and questions the need to build upwards ("what's wrong with horizontal?") but, nonetheless, Sokari says she's been looking forward to seeing the area develop.

"I hope the area continues to have a cosmopolitan feel" she says. "The people around here are so exciting. But I'd like to see more, green community space so that local businesses and people can thrive. And that should include more art, too."

"Living and working in Elephant and Castle, I love knowing that I've had work - inspired by this area - exhibited in some prestigious locations. I had a show called The Pleasure of Seeing You. It was based on the local, West African Pentecostal churches and these ladies that I'd see on Walworth Road, stopping traffic. I created 20 figures in total, each with an elaborate headdress."

Warming to her theme, and reflecting on the slaver statue that was torn down in Bristol, Sokari says "Statues are powerful - they affect you. I should know, I've had paint and stuff thrown at my work. But I don't think you should hide statues. I'm in the game of trying to have a conversation where I affect people."

She adds "I don't knowingly set out to rile people but, as an artist, you hope to make some kind of statement because you've been touched, and you want to say 'this is how I see things'."

Sokari also has modest ambitions for transforming her own, little patch of Elephant and Castle. She wants to create a community garden on a small piece of land near her home, where the poet and philanthropist Robert Browning once had a hall.

The pandemic put a halt to Sokari's schedule of exhibitions for 2020. She says "I've been totally freaked out - caught like a rabbit in headlights. Every single show I was in, suddenly stopped; put to the side, not going to happen this year, maybe next year."

The pause gave her some time for reassessment, 'a reset button' as she calls it, nonetheless, progress on the garden has been slow. However, she takes comfort in the fact that even when the galleries and museums were closed, her own work could still be seen locally; in Great Suffolk Street, Union Street and in Peckham.

"I love it when people come across my stuff by chance. I love being seen. That is the best part of me."
www.sokari.co.uk Read more about the people who live and work in Elephant and Castle
A version of this article was first published in the Elephant Magazine, Autumn 2020

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Home is where the art is - Elephant and Castle

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Taking a turn off East Street to reach Sokari Douglas Camp's live-work studios, you leave behind one kind of street theatre, comprising stallholders and shoppers, only to enter another, this time made-up of large metal figures; static and yet, somehow, every bit as animated. Literally skipping out of her home-cum-workshop, Sokari is certainly animated herself.

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Our traders relocated when the shopping centre closed on 24 September. You can find them at Castle Square, Ash Avenue at Castle Square, Elephant Arcade and Elephant Park.

Keep an eye on The Herd's website for more information on retailers and their new locations or see our online map.

ELEPHANT
ARCADE

Elephant Arcade is a new retail destination below the residential building Perronet House and opposite the Bakerloo line station. The arcade provides a variety of shops along with a popular local coffee outlet.

For more information visit the Elephant Arcade Facebook and Instagram

ASH
AVENUE

Ash Avenue at Castle Square, is a new pedestrianised road that is home to five diverse businesses, from clothing alterations, a watch and phone shop, women's fashion and a hair and beauty salon. Ash Avenue can be accessed from Castle Square or New Kent Road.

CASTLE
SQUARE

Castle Square is a temporary and affordable retail and restaurant space, created to ensure Elephant and Castle remains a vital and enlivened shopping destination whilst the new town centre is being developed. Castle Square can be found on Elephant Road opposite the overground station.

For more information visit castlesquarelondon.com or the Castle Square Instagram @castlesquarelondon

ELEPHANT
PARK

Elephant Park comprises a wide-ranging mix of shops and restaurants, start-ups, leisure, street food, and independent stores most of which, to date, can be found on Sayer Street. Access is from Walworth Road and Heygate Street (or Castle Square in late 2020).

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Our Traders are Moving - Elephant and Castle Town Centre

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Our traders relocated when the shopping centre closed on 24 September. You can find them at Castle Square, Ash Avenue at Castle Square, Elephant Arcade and Elephant Park. Keep an eye on The Herd's website for more information on retailers and their new locations or see our online map.

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After 5 years of DIY Cultures we're taking a break in 2018. We would like to say a massive THANK YOU to everyone who has supported, contributed and attended the fair, DIY Cultures has grown to be bigger than any of us expected and is the result of the efforts, encouragement and support of so many people. There will be no festival this spring but we would like to continue the dialogue through creating an online resource mapping the people, projects and campaigns involved over the past 5 editions. If you have been involved in the fair and would like to be included in the online resource please complete the form below.

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DIY Resource Form- https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSfokbPafhCBOz1Sw.../viewform...

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We love talking about the project and sharing our experiences so please get in contact for any speaking/collaborating opportunities at diycultureszac@gmail.com.

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Many thanks
Helena Wee, Sofia Niazi, Hamja Ahsan

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Where are they now?
Helena is exploring the use of computational arts methodologies in her current practice. She recently undertook a research trip to Transmediale festival in Berlin.
Hamja is touring his book Shy Radicals and investigating the role of zines in the Hillsborough Justice campaign.
Sofia is working as an artist alongside editing OOMK and co-running Rabbits Road Press.

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After 5 years of DIY Cultures we're taking a break in 2018. We would like to say a massive THANK YOU to everyone who has supported, contributed and attended the fair, DIY Cultures has grown to be bigger than any of us expected and is the result of the efforts, encouragement and support of so many people.

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I quite like the idea of doing a map and heavily leaning to that side however I am not actually sure it will convey what I want exactly...

Narrowing down my aims they have come to:

Showing the buildings of history in Elephant and castle. By highlighting histories it allows people to value the place and have an increased awareness of the past and therefore place greater historical value and meaning on the site - traces left there already. This way people will hopefully re think demolition. What Peckham Vision does is have a local list of buildings that are of historical value or importance. This is not a straight forward approach to tackling the issue of gentrification head on but looking at it from the perspective of keeping histories and old stuff old. How will this benefit the community by less demolition?

Because this would be a looking at the past and some of the buildings are no longer there or overlap each other - doing a map would not be the best outcome for this idea. Maybe more of an informative video and really focusing on how Elephant and Castle has a lot of hidden histories. In this way an animation may work as you can show the timeline of what was going on there.

The other idea would be highlighting the already vibrant community of E&C by bringing and showing the community projects that are already going on such as the community hub and creative elephant. This can easily be a very visual and utilise the idea of the map to take you on a journey of how great people are getting on. Again this is more of a subtle way of acknowledging there is not need for expensive community places as the ones already in place are affordable and open for everyone.

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One of our South London "specials." Specialist guided. Yes, this one's Short read: Seeing the Elephant in Sarf London. curated - come out of the teeming mind, that overflowing storehouse of local knowledge - by our south London specialist,

Long read: Let's run the film backwards. The £1.5 billion 21st century regeneration programme. The clumsy 1950s redevelopment. The devastation visited upon Elephant & Castle by the Luftwaffe. Before all that - including before the junction's being overwhelmed by motor traffic - this being a locality where people came to socialise, shop and be entertained. The French observer observing on the eve of World War I " South London's central edifice is a public house - the Elephant & Castle." The railway's pitching up. The Metropolitan Tabernacle pitching up (the portico survives). The local-boy- made-good story - Michael Faraday and his pioneering work on electricity. The tavern becoming a coaching halt and giving its name to the junction. The smithy being converted, about 1760, to a tavern. In 1641 John Flaxman setting up a blacksmith's forge on an island site here to take advantage of the passing horse-drawn traffic. Outside chance that Shakespeare alluded to it in T welfth Night (Antonio and Sebastian's decision to lodge "in the south suburbs, at the Elephant"). So, yes, Elephant & Castle's a palimpsest. And since, as the Forensic Scientists say, "every contact leaves a trace," it's fun to work back through this textbook example of the game London plays better than any other city in the world: the Regeneration Game. And into the bargain get to know a quintessential south London neighbourhood.

WALKING THE ELEPHANT - THE PRACTICALS

Walking the Elephant - The Regeneration Game walk takes place at TBA

To go on the Walking the Elephant walk meet just outside the Southbank University exit of Elephant & Castle Tube.

LONDON WALKS BAGATELLE

Isobel sometimes starts this walk by saying "the station you've just arrived at 'midwived' the first baby born on the Tube. It was 1924. Her name was Marie Cordery (though several newspapers got carried away and ran tales crediting her with names that began with the initials T.U.B.E.)." Glee. What fun it is to know stuff like that.

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Walking the Elephant - The Regeneration Game - London Walks

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One of our South London "specials." Specialist guided. Yes, this one's Short read: Seeing the Elephant in Sarf London. curated - come out of the teeming mind, that overflowing storehouse of local knowledge - by our south London specialist, Long read: Let's run the film backwards. The £1.5 billion 21st century regeneration programme.

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One day in the summer of 2005, I ventured into a passage off Rye Lane in the middle of Peckham town centre. I live 10 minutes walk away. I went to find out about a large site in the borough development plan which was at the time subject to public hearings. The site was designated for total demolition and redevelopment.

I discovered a place full of large sturdy Victorian era industrial buildings, home to a wide range of businesses from artists, to churches, to furniture makers, to town centre warehouses, a DIY and builders' merchants, and many other activities. An active place with much small and micro economic life all overlooked or dismissed by the planners, consultants and developers except as a site needing 'regeneration'.

That gap between reality and 'regeneration' sparked off a local campaign under the banner 'Peckham Vision'. The 'vision' was and is based on reality and how places fit together and cannot be simply separated out as 'sites'.

A few years later having won that battle we were plunged into another across the road around Peckham Rye station. Network Rail and Southwark Council published plans for vacant possession of about 60 small and micro businesses that had taken root in the arches and buildings around the station. But they were to be removed to build 5-7 storey blocks of flats out of scale with the Conservation Area. This was for 'regeneration'. Yet the place had been self regenerating for several years becoming a vibrant part of the emerging local leisure and entertainment economy. The local community once again had to fight a hard campaign to point this out and win the battle.

These experiences are sadly too frequent where development and 'regeneration' descend on neighbourhoods. It is because it is outside-in development, instead of inside-out starting from what is there - eg the buildings, spaces, people, uses, and their potential. That is information and local knowledge that is essential, but missing from much redevelopment, whether it is housing, or businesses or a mix of both. Trust cannot be recovered, nor can there be good planning and development, without bringing in this missing local knowledge before any redevelopment begins.

Only a small shift is needed to begin to turn outside-in development to inside-out. All development should start with the facts! Just a standard baseline recorded before anything starts to change it. But it has to be an accurate facts baseline. The only way to get that is to record it and it by working with those who know the place intimately - owners, lease holders and tenants, users of the activities, nearby places, local people affected by the activities, and the social infrastructure holding them all together.

Neighbourhoods are not just physical places to be redeveloped, they are a living system made up of people in places. This living system of multiple interactions is forever present, alongside the macro world of corporate organisations which are the big beasts in the human social eco-system.[1] The community system is visible usually only in the micro world of people interactions which is its life blood and nervous system. It becomes visible to the macro world when it is disturbed, like rolling over a stone from the soil and seeing the teeming life revealed. The current public health emergency is such a disturbance revealing the community capacity to create new forms and processes like Mutual Aid groups and similar everywhere like an immune system defending its organism.

When development descends on neighbourhoods as an outside-in force, the organism will attempt to defend itself. How much better it will be if we can shift to inside-out development and start from a mutually agreed fact based audit of the baseline of the living neighbourhood. Let us make this part of the new normal as we emerge from the public health emergency. I hope that Grosvenor's new Community Charter will be a means to begin to establish fact-based audits and inside-out development as part of that new normal.

[1] The dynamics of these two social systems are described and explained in my paper 'community engagement in the social eco-system dance' : https://bit.ly/2yIoS7b
The views and opinions expressed by the author in this blog are the author's personal views and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions, policy or position of any member of the Grosvenor Group. The Grosvenor Group has not independently verified the information contained in this blog or the completeness and accuracy of it.

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One day in the summer of 2005, I ventured into a passage off Rye Lane in the middle of Peckham town centre. I live 10 minutes walk away. I went to find out about a large site in the borough development plan which was at the time subject to public hearings.

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After a campaign organised by the amenity groups in Southwark, leading up to the local elections in May 2018, the Council agreed to introduce a Heritage Local List. This has now been included as a new policy in the proposed New Southwark Plan (NSP). The Council are aiming to consult on the preparation of the Local List in 2020 in a draft Supplementary Planning Document (SPD). Further information is shown on this webpage below. Click here for Peckham Vision's display panel explaining the heritage Local List for events in Peckham.

Peckham buildings and spaces December 2019

In Southwark we will in the next year or so have a Council Heritage Local List which will be an official way to record all local buildings and spaces that have local value through social history or architectural characteristics that deserve protection from demolition or redevelopment. This is a great opportunity for people who care about communities or historical buildings to identify what they think needs protection and get it on to the list for nomination when the process starts. Peckham Vision is working with the Peckham Heritage Partnership to develop such a list for this area and would encourage anyone interested in getting involved in this to get in touch with us through email info@peckhamvision.org . For background and further info please see below.

Community Workshop 3rd July

Wednesday 3rd July 6.30pm drop in to the Old Mill Building, see inside and complete our short survey; 7-9pm Local Heritage workshop.
Do let us know if you're coming on 3rd July. Book your FREE place on Eventbrite at https://tinyurl.com/localbuildings

See leaflet.

Making a Community List

The Peckham Heritage Regeneration Partnership and Peckham Vision invite you to join us in a project to gather a Community List of the buildings and spaces which are of social, historic, cultural or architectural interest to you. We're focussing on Peckham, but contributions from across Southwark are also welcome. This project is an investigation of the people, buildings, spaces, and stories which make our everyday environment. We aim to use this process of gathering a Community List to contribute to Southwark Council's consultation on the borough wide Local List, which is due later this year.

What is a Local List?

A Local List identifies buildings and structures, (based on criteria agreed by the council), 'which have townscape, architectural, or historical interest'.

Buildings and structures on a local list are called 'non designated heritage assets' and they should be considered in planning decisions.

'Designated heritage assets' are generally called 'listed buildings', which are protected by law. Listed buildings are rated Grade 1, Grade 2* and Grade 2. Grade 1 is reserved for the most exceptional buildings.

Share and explore with us

A building or space may interest you for many reasons... * Do you like it - tell us why! * Does it tell you about the history of Peckham? * Do you have happy memories of time spent there? * Do you like the architectural style? * Is it a landmark in your daily life? * Do you already know something about it, and you want to find out more?

Join in: nominate a building!

Before the Workshop, you can contribute to the project by:

Finding a local building or space (in Peckham or Southwark) that you love or you find interesting

Photographing your local building / space and noting its address

Emailing the photo, the building's address and your details to us on goodlocalbuildings@gmail.com

Everyone is welcome at the Workshop. You don't have to have sent us anything beforehand!
Do let us know if you're coming on 3rd July. Book your FREE place on Eventbrite at https://tinyurl.com/localbuildings

Public Meeting 20th March 2019

Peckham Vision have arranged a public event to encourage community interest across the borough in the preparation of the Local List. This will be on
Wednesday 20th March, 6pm exhibition, 7pm - 9pm meeting with Speakers & Discussion
At The Old Mill Building , 72 Copeland Road, SE15, opposite Bournemouth Road. More information about the Old Mill Building and events.

If you are keen to protect local heritage in your area and also to encourage other local people to help in that protection, this is an event for you. We will explore how community groups can take action on this in their own area, and you can connect with others keen to take action.

The exhibition and the meeting will look at the Old Mill Building as an example of a local heritage asset, how to think about heritage buildings and spaces, and about the preparation of the Heritage Local List. There will be several short talks followed by questions and discussion.

We hope that many from SPN will come to the meeting to take part in thinking of ways to enable local people to say what is important to them in their area's local heritage, and find out how to protect it.

If you aim to come, to help us gauge numbers, please register on eventbrite.

Historic England Guidance

Historic England produce guidance on the criteria for nominations to a Local List. They say: "There may be many buildings and sites in a local planning authority's area that make a positive contribution to its local character and sense of place because of their heritage value. Although such heritage assets may not be nationally designated or even located within the boundaries of a conservation area, they may be offered some level of protection by the local planning authority identifying them on a formally adopted list of local heritage assets." More from: https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/hpg/has/locallylistedhas

Protecting our Local Heritage

Peckham Vision's display panel explaining the heritage Local List for events in Peckham.

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After a campaign organised by the amenity groups in Southwark, leading up to the local elections in May 2018, the Council agreed to introduce a Heritage Local List. This has now been included as a new policy in the proposed New Southwark Plan (NSP).

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Creative Elephant Newsletter Want to keep your inbox up to date with all our events and happenings? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative elephant world.

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Travel and travel planning are being disrupted by the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. For the latest updates, read The New York Times's Covid-19 coverage here.
Many of us are in the same situation: homebound, a little restless and a lot distracted. Not only are our future travel plans on hold, but even our local outings and excursions - a quick trip to the market, a stroll in the park, a walk with the dog - are limited. That doesn't mean we need to curtail our wanderlust or stop exploring the world around us, and within us. Here is an idea that will help fill the void left by travel restrictions and social distancing, redirect our attention to the immediate worlds we know best - either before our eyes or in our minds - while keeping our creative juices flowing:

Make an illustrated map!

The rigid and scientific rules of cartography simply do not apply here! Nope. While an illustrated map is often a wildly useless tool for providing directions, it can be a beautiful and highly personal reflection of a place you, friends and family know quite well. It can tell a story, a personal history, or be a unique lens through which one can experience a special place. An illustrated map can be loose and hand-drawn, filled with fun drawings and doodles that together make a sometimes inaccurate, but always spot on record of a memory or a place from one's own perspective.

As a freelance illustratorwho specializes in map illustration, I find that my clients - hotels, travel magazines, colleges - ask for an illustrated map because they want to excite their visitors, encourage them to learn more about or visit a specific place. You can use a comparable tactic to create your own illustrated map. Which place do you enjoy the most or know the best? Maybe it's a favorite vacation spot or even your immediate neighborhood. Using illustration to recreate and interpret a place rewards your creativity and shifts your imagination into a dreamy space of idealistic representation and positive recollection.

Follow these eight steps to make your own illustrated map:

Will you illustrate a place you know and love? Maybe your last vacation? Your own neighborhood?

Or will you illustrate a place you've never been? Maybe the first place you plan to visit once travel is safe again? Or the No. 1 city on your bucket list? Or even a fictional place, like the city in your favorite book, film, or series?!

What sites are there to see? What activities and experiences are there to have? What landmarks or natural wonders exist at your destination? Pick eight to 10 specific sites in and around your destination.

Consider a fun theme, like all the historical landmarks or public parks or favorite trees or interesting buildings - the possibilities are endless! You could even build a narrative into your map, so that it tells the story of an adventure or illustrates a specific itinerary or captures the memories of your time at this place. For example, create a memory map of your childhood world!

Before I start illustrating a map I use an online mapping tool, such as Google Maps, to plot all the sites. This helps me understand where they all are in relation to each other. This is totally optional - doing it from memory sometimes produces hilarious results!

Using a large sheet of paper, start with the most important site on your list. Maybe this is your home or a hotel you've stayed in, or a famous landmark. Lightly sketch a little numbered marker for this site in the center of the space (you'll erase that marker later.) Next, place similar markers all around your central site.

It's OK to distort your map by reducing the distances between places - throw accuracy out the window!

An icon is a little spot illustration that represents a site. It does not need to be a drawing of the actual building - it could be anything! A bagel, a taco, a movie camera, a dog walker, an elephant, a rainbow, whatever is super fun and reminds you that specific site. Start with your central site: Erase the little marker and draw an icon in its place.

Find the biggest empty space left on your sketch and use it for the title of your map.

It's important to include at least a few major roads. These give viewers good points of reference.

If you have more room, consider placing a compass, an inset map and a legend, too!

This is my favorite part! In the empty spaces on your map, illustrate trees, birds, animals, flowers, clouds, rainbows, cars, swirlies, dots, doodles, whatever you want!
Show us your illustrated maps! Tag us at @nytimestravel on Instagram to have your work featured. You can also email us at travel@nytimes.com.

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How to Make an Illustrated Map in 8 Steps

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Travel and travel planning are being disrupted by the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. For the latest updates, read The New York Times's Covid-19 coverage here . Many of us are in the same situation: homebound, a little restless and a lot distracted.

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Blind Spots was created as part of a workshop by the Museum of Communication Berlin and Deutscher Comicverein. Hoping to shed light on the spiralling costs of rent in Berlin, Jessika Knauer and Alexander Bednarz have put the focus on the often invisible people behind housing policy decisions. Alexander Bednarz is a draftsman and illustrator from Bochum. More of his work is available on Facebook and Instagram. Jessika Knauer works as a freelance author in Berlin; more about her can be found on her website. "Blind Spots" was her first foray into the world of comic journalism. If you're an illustrator or graphic artist with an idea for The Illustrated City series, email us at Cities@theguardian.com Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, catch up on our best stories or sign up for our weekly newsletter

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Blind spots: a story about displacement in Berlin - a cartoon

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Blind Spots was created as part of a workshop by the Museum of Communication Berlin and Deutscher Comicverein. Hoping to shed light on the spiralling costs of rent in Berlin, Jessika Knauer and Alexander Bednarz have put the focus on the often invisible people behind housing policy decisions.

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thinking about my aims again, and what i plan on doing, I realised that because of Covid, that has very much effected the community in a lot of ways and the community hub which I am not sure will be around physically. The idea of doing a map promotes difficulty especially during changing times when hubs and institutions come and go very quickly. A map seems to keep landmarks in position that are noticeable and can withstand a long time period whilst this is the antithesis of what is happening in the redevelopment.

perhaps I need to make it more about the hidden side of elephant and castle ?

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Was thinking about how difficult it is to really place exactly the different places of community and different hubs and all of the things that go on within elephant and castle.

Because it is constantly changing with various pop up places I was thinking about perhaps going a more digital route where the map and aspects of it can be transformed a little easier as the place changes.

Things can go out of date so quickly so having a digital and movable map - like a jigsaw puzzle - can re arrange as the location develops.

Something that is more interactive. I liked how I was able to drag and drop my little characters on Photoshop and feel that may be a nice variety of stickers pictures to highlight places of interest.

Similar to the post it notes in the process of maps from luise vormittag

might be better that its somewhat of a buildable site? create your own elephant and castle almost? or more like a "hey this is a good restaurant here"

I feel this idea moving forward takes on the ideas of a lot of the already present websites, information and maps out there but putting it all together in a more illustration form.

I think the difficult part will be deciding on how much will be story telling and imagery and how much is usability.  Might the be a physical piece as well? magnets? stickers?

open source easy access to information for locals or people visiting but probably more from locals?

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talking through my project and deciding that it was a map that was going to be a digital space where you can drag and drop illustrated icons to show where your favourite restaurant or place to sit is. This will be able to keep up with the ever changing place of elephant and castle as new places come in and it is difficult to find the old places. I want to be able to evoke a collective narrative from people of places they enjoy which i hope can bring together people and allow them to think and reflect on their experiences. An easy way for them to pin point memories or something.

Because it would be a website and I do not have any website building skills or coding experience, I will make a design of it showing where I would want things to be. Even if I researched and looked into how to build one it the time it would take me would be over the deadline period which I had learnt from my last project. A suggestion was to use a Y page navigation and schematic tools [diagram - eg circuit diagram ] to show how it would work

An interesting piece of information talked about was the psychogeography of Iain Sinclair. Looking this up later on I felt really tied in with my work on trying to evoke feeling and understanding through maps.

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Psychogeography, as the term suggests, is the intersection of psychology and geography. It focuses on our psychological experiences of the city, and reveals or illuminates forgotten, discarded, or marginalised aspects of the urban environment.

Both the theory and practice of psychogeography have been around since 1955, when French theorist Guy Debord coined the term. While it emerged from the Situationist International movement in France, the practice has far-reaching implications. It's relevant, for instance, in contemporary Sydney.

Psychogeographers advocate the act of becoming lost in the city. This is done through the , or "drift".

Because purposeful walking has an agenda, we do not adequately absorb certain aspects of the urban world. This is why the drift is essential to psychogeography; it better connects walkers to the city.

Psychogeographers idolise the , a figure conceived in 19th-century France by Charles Baudelaire and popularised in academia by Walter Benjamin in the 20th century. A romantic stroller, the flâneur wandered about the streets, with no clear purpose other than to wander.

In his 2013 Paris Review article, In Praise of the Flâneur, Bijan Stephen observes that the use of the flâneur "as a vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity" fell out of favour in the ensuing decades. Stephen poses the question:

But as we grow inexorably busier - due in large part to the influence of technology - might flânerie be due for a revival?

Walking as an act of insurgency

The revival had already begun, thanks to popular contemporary psychogeographers, notably Iain Sinclair and Will Self (whose book Psychogeography was published ten years ago).

In his book London Orbital, Iain Sinclair describes a walk around the M25 and the "unloved outskirts of the city". He observes:

I had to walk around London's orbital motorway; not on it, but within what the Highways Agency calls the 'acoustic footprints'. The soundstream. Road has replaced river. The M25 does the job of the weary Thames, shifting contraband, legal and illegal cargoes, offering a picturesque backdrop to piracy of every stamp.

Sinclair describes his walk as having a "ritual purpose" to "exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the Dome, to celebrate the sprawl of London". He also describes walking as a virtue.

Self sees walking as "a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum". He describes the solitary walker as "an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller".

Psychogeography is therefore useful in showing that walking is not only an art form in itself. It is also crucial in understanding the complication between the histories and myths of urban landscapes.

Psychogeography in Sydney

Sydney is already notable for being a walking city, and certain people are eager to explore its psychogeographical potential.

Current Sydney "psychogeographical" practitioners and/or theorists include Vanessa Berry, Ian Collinson and Peter Doyle. Berry's blog Mirror Sydney focuses on her psychogeographical adventures in Sydney.

In her wanderings around places such as St Peters, Tempe, Leichhardt, Sydenham and Hornsby, her practice of psychogeography "re-enchants" places that, she says, "are overlooked or not usually subjects for attention".

She says:

Some of the Sydney places I have most enjoyed writing [about] are ones from the recent past that have now fallen into disuse or disrepair, but are still present in the urban environment.

In April 2017, Berry hosted the Sydney Lost and Found bus tour with Sydney Living Museums.

Psychogeography has other uses besides drifting or re-enchanting marginalised spaces. It has a historical use as well. In cases where the landscape has been affected by crime or suffering, psychogeographic readings are especially poignant.

David Brown, of UNSW, for example, provides a psychogeographic reading of a walk from Maroubra Beach to Bondi and its criminal history. Walking to Marks Park in Bondi, the scene of a series of homophobic attacks in the 1980s, which went largely unsolved, Brown observes:

The everyday acts of walking and talking while passing through a 'landscape' serve to constitute a criminology of everyday life, illustrating the way in which a consciousness of crime, crime sites, analyses and theories permeates the ways a 'tourist trail' might be experienced and seen, myths made and histories forged.

The fact that the park sits near the Sculptures by the Sea - a much-hyped tourist destination in Bondi since 1997 - is significant; it seems to trivialise the brutal history of the area, a history written over and unnoticed by tourists, and forgotten by locals.

Traversing the memory divide

University of Melbourne Professor Maria Tumarkin describes this in terms of " traumascapes ". A traumascape is a "distinctive category of places transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that stretches across the world".

Similarly, Sinclair talks of what he calls " Obscenery", a neologism referring to negative transitions in the urban landscape. He uses it in reference to a garbage heap that became reconstructed as a recreational space, known as Beckton Alps. The fact that visitors did not know they were standing on a previous garbage waste site fascinated Sinclair.

The transition of a space from one use to another undergirds much of psychogeography's preoccupation; the notion of a palimpsest - an object or piece of writing with new material superimposed over earlier writings - is particularly important.

In his book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen discusses the increasing phenomenon of selective memory in cities that confronted trauma (Berlin, New York, etc).

He talks specifically of "Berlin as palimpsest". He sees Berlin as a "disparate city-text that is being rewritten while earlier texts are preserved, traces restored, erasures documented". He describes the city as a text haunted by its past and present negotiations with its Nazi and Communist history.

This is what makes psychogeography a particularly useful critique beyond mere urban re-enchantment. Psychogeography thrives as an interrogation of space and history; it compels us to abandon - at least temporarily - our ordinary conceptions of the face value of a location, so that we may question its mercurial history.

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Psychogeography: a way to delve into the soul of a city

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Wandering the city by foot helps us look beneath ordinary conceptions of the face value of a place to the meanings built up and lost over time.

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Overall i am quite happy with my final outcome for the personal project side.

of course there is so much more I would have liked to of added however due to time limitations this will have to do.

I would have liked to of shown how the website would work by adding animations or having animated features on the page. Also more research to mock up the website so it could be a fake version to test on some sort of domain

I would have liked to of done more development of the icons and chosen a bit more carefully the colour palletes and details such as fonts, layout and spacing.

In terms of its success in reaching audience, I have not tested it yet however my padlet is open for feedback