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Elephant and Castle gentrification 'patient zero'

newsJul 20, 202614104

The new £500m Elephant development in south London will welcome its first commercial tenant this month, matcha-serving Blank Street Coffee, even as displaced traders say promises they could return have been broken. The scheme replaces the old 1965 shopping centre with a modern town square flanked by tower blocks and comprises about 40 shops, restaurants and bars, a cinema and gym, a new home for the London College of Communication, 55,000 sq ft of offices and hundreds of flats. Longstanding traders such as Diana Sach, who once employed more than 30 people in a Latin American restaurant and deli, say developers Get Living and Southwark council failed to rehouse them; around 90 Latin American businesses were displaced and only a handful found space on a temporary trading site. Temporary units offered were small metal container “shoe boxes” now set to be dismantled, which many owners said were commercially unviable. Oli Mould, professor of social, cultural and historical geography at Royal Holloway, calls the redevelopment almost “patient zero” of London’s gentrification, warning it creates an identikit homogeneous place and risks eroding local community character. Residents are due to move into the new flats later this summer, while the dispute over broken relocation promises leaves many former traders without a viable route back into Elephant and Castle.

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