• Elephant and Castle - A History of Change
• Elephant and Castle presentation 2007
• Elephant and Castle Today
• Shopping
• Leisure and Culture
• Education, Training and Employment

Elephant and Castle has witnessed dramatic changes in recent times. Three hundred years ago the area was sparsely populated. The villages of Walworth and Newington were set among market gardens, fields and open marshland. 18th century Walworth was a prosperous suburb, but by Victorian times slums had swallowed up the commons. The 19th century saw an eightfold increase in the population.

Elephant and Castle has always been an important traffic junction and was once known as “the Piccadilly of South London”. The Roman Stane Street, running up what is now Newington Causeway was joined by highways from Kent, Walworth and Kennington, and later by roads fanning out to London’s new bridges. In 1641, heavy demand from a constant flow of horse-drawn vehicles led to a blacksmith, John Flaxman, setting up his forge on an island site between the roads. In the middle of the 18th century, the ‘smithy’ became an inn and was renamed the Elephant and Castle.

The Elephant’s heyday was between about 1880 and the Blitz, with shops lining every approach to the junction, including the department store William Tarn and Co, Hurlock’s, for children’s clothes, and Rabbits, the shoe shop.

Walworth is mentioned in the Domesday Book as a tiny manor. King Edmund (934-946) supposedly granted the land to his jester Hitard, and the notion of ’playing the fool’ seems to run through the history of the area. Entertainment and leisure facilities included dance palaces, “penny gaff” theatres, the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall, and The Coronet, which opened as the Theatre Royal in 1872.

Religion and welfare were originally centred on the ancient church of St Mary in Newington. Nearby, a huge Baptist church – the Metropolitan Tabernacle – was built for CH Spurgeon, “the prince of preachers”, while the Lock Hospital for Lepers was located near Lock Fields, the site of the present-day Heygate Estate. Housing included the Drapers Almshouses in Cross Street, terraces of townhouses in New Kent Road, and elegant mansions, some of which still exist in Marlborough Place.

Public transport arrived with the introduction of the horse-bus in 1829. The railway to Kent opened in 1862 and tramlines were laid in 1871. The Northern Line followed in 1890 and the Bakerloo in 1906 – which still has its original station.

Devastated during the Blitz, the Elephant was transformed over the next two decades. High density, slab-block estates and offices replaced the terraced streets, and the Faraday monument, housing an electricity substation for the Bakerloo line, replaced the dance hall at the roundabout’s centre. In the early 1960’s the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre was built, the first of its kind in Europe.

You can discover more about the history of Elephant and Castle in our free Walk the Elephant brochures.