I went for another drift today. Except it wasn’t a true drift as I was forcing myself to go to areas that I hadn’t been to before. I wanted to find new interesting places to include in my map. What I did find was that there really isn’t much interesting around Elephant and Castle. At least it is near to some exciting places such as the South Bank which puts the Heygate way above some out of town council estates I can think of in the North of England. The most interest I find in Elephant is the potential it has, the buildings that will come, the investment it will recieve. This will all take time though. In a period where many are being displaced and no sign of any answers to the violent crime that much of South London suffers from things may well get worse around Elephant before they get better. As I wandered around today I wondered how much difference planning and architecture can make. I get very excited by new buildings, and Southwark has some pretty impressive ones in the pipeline, but I do know that others do not share my interest. Hopefully as South Bank University grows so will the input students give to area. Hopefully this map will encourage students to consider the area in which they study a little more and maybe make some differences that bricks and mortar cannot. That said, as it stands my map concentrates heavily on development and architecture in the area. One of the places I photographed today was a new building containing flats for the first of the people to be moved out of the Heygate Estate. Its unashamedly colourful exterior is surely designed to stick two fingers up at the austere, monotonous grey lines across the road. The future could be said to be red, yellow and orange…
There are more details about this project here and more about new development in Southwark and London as a whole here at the New London Archicture website. Another site I found about moving around London is the Legible London website with the interesting statistic that 45% of people use the tube map to navigate above ground. It seems that there is very little of these type of websites that concentrate on the local areas of London instead of the city as a whole.
So the map is nearly there. I have some night shots I want to take this evening. I need to do a little more research and find some more intersting places to include. One site that has been recommended to me is MySouthwark.co.uk so I shall be checking that out soon. Hopefully by the end of this week the map will be 100% completed. I have been reluctant to start the webpage until the map is done as I do not want to have to go back a change things later. By the end of next week I would like to have the Homepage and the page links in place so the structure of the site is done.
