The newly re-opened window on the summery heat is bringing new sounds to my little nest of a room. Many sounds have become familiar companions that have receded into the background: sirens, distant traffic hum, a few rare birds, helicopters, at night, the sighs of the Bakerloo line trains as they come to rest or leave to work, school children during the day, the odd unidentified banging. A couple of days ago, what I assumed to be new neighbours where playing Bee Gees songs quite loudly. This morning, as the day is already heavy with the promise of the heat to come later, a different chant wafted in: a soft, almost apologetic, monotonous chant, rusty with the harsh sounds of the arabic language, slightly distorted by the speaker it was coming through, sang to me of early prayer, of a different, for me rarely heard, experience, of another face, a bearded and dignified one, of our beloved London.
Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at
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