Elephant and Castle Past and Present

Regeneration Programme

Transport & Sustainabilty The Green Elephant

Working with Business and the Community

• Introduction
• An Overview
• Regeneration Timeline
• Elephant and Castle - The Future
• Buildings Under Development

Introduction to the Programme

Southwark Council is taking a unique lead role to ensure regeneration proposals meet the long-term needs of Southwark residents, and leave a positive legacy for centuries to come.

Residents’ needs include more jobs, better security, higher quality housing, improved schools, new business opportunities, more shops and better leisure facilities.

Working with a multidisciplinary professional development team, including Foster and Partners Architects, Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design, Space Syntax, Jan Gehl, Inventa, JMP and Steer Davis Gleeve, among others, Southwark Council has created a framework for development for the large scale regeneration of Elephant and Castle.

The framework for development was adopted as supplementary planning guidance in February 2004, following an extensive three-month public consultation, in which 80 per cent of local residents supported the proposals.

The council will now work in partnership with a commercial developer to regenerate the whole area, using the framework for development as planning guidance.

By setting the agenda in this way, Southwark Council has adopted an extremely radical approach. Major regeneration projects are rarely led by the public sector  schemes of a similar scale, for example the King's Cross redevelopment, are more usually initiated by private developers. The fact that the council is also the major landowner in the area gives it an unprecedented level of control, real power to speak and act on behalf of its citizens

Key features of the Elephant and Castle framework for development include:

• demolition of the shopping centre and Heygate Estate
• rehousing of Heygate Estate residents into high quality social housing in the Elephant and Castle area
• removal of the congested road system and rerouting of traffic out of the core area
• creation of a new pedestrian-friendly town centre
• development of 6, 600 new homes
• creation of 75,000m2 of modern retail and leisure facilities
• design of an improved transport interchange
• creation of two new parks
• addition of two extra schools, including a city academy
• creation of over 4,000 new jobs as a result of these changes
• adoption of a range of innovative measures to minimise energy consumption
• quality design at the heart of the plans

London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, commended the framework for development in November 2004, when he presented the Elephant and Castle regeneration team with the award for Best Local Authority Planner at the London Planning Awards. Mayor Livingstone said the judges were impressed by the “excellent team effort focusing on co-ordination of the council departments, external stakeholders and the local community”. He added that the development scheme had the ”added achievement of radically shifting developer aspirations away from a shopping centre, whilst coping with challenges to focus on a comprehensive regeneration scheme that has strong local community involvement.”
 
In June 2006, Southwark Council also won a prestigious international masterplanning award for the Elephant and Castle framework for development at the Building Exchange Symposium.
Download or order the Framework for Development.