This week-end, together with thousands of other people of all ages and background (I saw a BBC political journalist, whose name escapes me, together with his family and also caught a glimpse of a former flatmate), I visited the darker recesses of Waterloo Station where The Cans Festival was taking place.
Leake Street, a dismal little street under the station itself had been transformed for the bank holiday week-end into a street art gallery.
The most famous artist on show was by far our local Banksy but there were people from all over showing either full on frescos or more humble efforts. Members of the public were also invited to wield the cans.
I went there on Sunday and Monday morning (and will probably return in a few days to see how the images fair when left to their own device) and took about 200 pictures, a selection of which can be viewed here.
Enjoy.
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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