Last Thursday, I was given the chance to visit the Olympic Park in Est London. Perfect weather for it too.
I had had an opportunity back in November but stupidly had forgotten my passport. The Olympics Delivery Authority's idea of security being rather restrictive, my Tesco card didn't prove enough to let me and I had to be content with viewing the stadium from the viewing point outside the perimetre of the park, take a couple of pics and go home.
This time I got in and did a write up for Londonist (here). The tour took place is single-decker bus, so the quality of the pics is not what it could have been.
You can view said pics on flickr, here.
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...
Wow, very interesting photographs, it's looking amazingly better than I had thought it could.
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