Elephant and Castle & Hinduism

This morning I went down to the Heygate estate next to Elephant and Castle. The whole thing is scheduled for demolition at some point next year, as part of a huge redevelopment that will see whole estates, the shopping centre, and the underground station knocked down and built up in a more pleasing style. It seems that since I started working for local papers, all I have really done is speak to people in the path of bulldozers (see the front page of the Paddington and Westminster Times last week for the results of similar enquiries at Tottenham Court Road).

Southwark Council is trying to achieve the impossible: rehouse the thousands of people who are on the estate without having built any new housing stock. Apparently, according to Ernie, the process was going well until the first 600 moved out, then saturation point was reached, and the council are trying to cram the remaining residents into more and more unlikely places.

There may seem little to love about the huge concrete buildings. Modernist buildings do not age well: the whole baroque apparatus of ornamentation, cornices, friezes, architraves and so on had been dismissed as the unnecessary junk of history. It was only after the buildings of Le Corbusier et al had aged enough that it was discovered that the old ornamental features did well in channelling rainwater, protecting walls, and otherwise baffling the processes of age and decay. Consider the caryatids of almost any North London building, which are at once structural - supporting elements of buildings - and also the most fortunate of sculptures, which always have a roof over their heads to cover them from the rain.

There is no ornamentation on the Heygate estate, apart from if you count the satellite dishes that so cover the sheer walls that the buildings look colonised by a riot of black metallic flowers.

All six of the residents I spoke to today had moved into the estate when it had first been built in 1974. They moved out of ancient landlord-held tenements, built pre-war, that stood in locations like Manor Place in South London. The scraps of culture that have come down to me from these places don't seem salutory. Horrible references from Dickens and Eliot, knowledge of a particularly unglamorous set of murders in a now demolished street called Rillington Place.

Dennis, a current Heygate resident, told me: "When we first moved here, they came to our tenements and told us - 'the new estate is ready, would you like to go and have a look?' We did, and we liked it."

It must have seemed an incredible gift from the state to the poorer people in society. The prime gripe of the residents now is that they aren't being offered anything half as nice in return for where they are living. Meanwhile, instead of solving the problem by building decent housing for the residents who are there, they offer deals and trinkets. The most absurd endeavour was to hire, at the cost of £2000, stress counsellors to come in and set up shop in one of the abandoned flats, and invited the local residents in. The council counsellors were faced with a lot of angry people shouting 'where am I going to live? Why have I been served an eviction notice?' and predictably, did nothing to destress the residents. (Luckily, ITV were on hand to capture these classic moments.) Otherwise, the tenants are rushed out to a showflat somewhere further south, and offered cash to sign on another related flat that they haven't seen.

Throughout the debacle, the local council acts in various different guises, like aspects of the divine. Brahma, the creator, who built all of these houses, is dead. (Building houses is now looked after by smaller deities or demons called housing associations, who are very susceptible to financial offerings.) The local residents are left with Shiva who captivates - the various false literature the council posts, the stress counsellors, the lovely pictures of new housing that have yet to materialise; Shiva the Terrible, who frightens with eviction notices, Shiva the second hand car dealer, who conjures up crackpot deals to palm off other flats on the residents, and Shiva the Destroyer, who is due to arrive at some point next year. None of the aspects of the council seem to work together: as Terry, the most disenchanted of the residents I met, put it: 'The right hand don't know what the left is doing'. He is right, apart from the fact there are more than just two hands - there are dozens.

The residents themselves didn't want the place saved, although it was lovely. Dennis cracked me up with tales of how a group of 'lefty nutters' as he termed them, had jumped on the bandwagon with a campaign to 'Save the Heygate'. There was no question of saving it for them, it was just a question of being rehoused in places as good as they were - and these flats were absolutely lovely, nicer than my current house even - in such a way that their community, made almost exclusively of people who had moved there originally in 1974, stayed together.

I jump at the chance to make this point outside the febrile atmosphere of the newsroom, because papers will often slam councils and planners as a kind of reflex action. The tenants, on the face of it, were not asking for much. Presumably, somewhere near the top of the various council cabinets and panels and commissioning bodies, everything seemed to be making sense. But the reality on the ground was that the various processes of the council were completely opaque and Byzantine. The less the tenants knew, the more they were worried, and they ranged from Ernie, who was fairly clued up, knew his rights, and wasn't too bothered, to an unnamed 80 year old man who was almost the sole survivor in one of the bigger blocks, stranded right up at the top who understood nothing apart from the eviction notice and maybe not even that, and had nobody to talk to about it.

Perhaps the tutelary deity of Elephant and Castle is the eponymous elephant himself, plinthed at the front of the shopping centre. Anyone who travels to South London will have seen him. Ganesha, the elephant god of Hinduism, has two aspects: Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles: proof that, in addition to his other aspects, he is most definitely the patron saint of development projects. At the Elephant and Castle, he has reached a furious state: he gazes in myopic plastic fury at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and its classical entablature across the road. He is as angry and single minded as some high-up development mandarin, with his pet project, the castle, carried on his back: a huge chip on his shoulder.