Five years ago, the War on Terror (TM) kicked off for good after weeks of toing and froing at the UN and demonstrations around the world by millions of people.
Five years on, things don't seem to have improved much. The world is still and dangerous place (probably more dangerous as a result of this war) and hundred of thousand of people have died seemingly for nothing.
I took this picture on the Embankment during the anti-war demonstration on 15 February 2003 which brought together 2 million people to the streets of London, making it, I think, the biggest ever demonstration in the UK.
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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