A brand new £500 million town centre is opening its doors in Elephant and Castle this month, but for many of the traders who once called the area home, it feels less like a celebration and more like a betrayal.
Diana Sach ran a thriving Latin American restaurant and deli in the old Elephant and Castle shopping centre for years. At its peak, she employed more than 30 people and fed hundreds of customers daily, many of them drawn in by her famous Peruvian empanadas. The place had colour, character, and a real sense of community. Then in 2021, the bulldozers moved in.
The old shopping centre, a bit rough around the edges but beloved by the local Latin American community and generations of south Londoners, was knocked down to make way for the gleaming development that now stands in its place. Traders were told they would be able to return once the new development was ready. Many say those promises have not been kept.
Sach is one of several displaced business owners who now watch from the outside as the new buildings rise up, shiny and tall, in the place where their livelihoods once stood. For her and others like her, the redevelopment of Elephant and Castle is not a success story. It is a cautionary tale about who cities are actually being built for.
Elephant and Castle has long been one of London’s most culturally rich but economically overlooked neighbourhoods. Sitting in the borough of Southwark, it became a hub for Latin American migrants from the 1980s onwards, with Colombian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian and other communities setting up shops, restaurants and social spaces that gave the area a unique identity you would struggle to find anywhere else in the capital.
The shopping centre, opened in 1965 and once described as the ‘Piccadilly Circus of south London’, became the beating heart of that community. Yes, it was dated. Yes, it needed work. But it was alive in a way that many redeveloped areas simply are not.
Critics of the project argue that Elephant and Castle is now at serious risk of becoming a textbook example of gentrification, the process by which working-class and minority communities are gradually pushed out of an area as property values rise and wealthier residents and businesses move in. Some have gone as far as calling it London’s gentrification ‘patient zero’, a place where the blueprint for displacing communities under the banner of regeneration is being written in real time.
The developers behind the new town centre would likely push back hard on that framing. Regeneration projects of this scale always come with commitments to affordable housing, community spaces and support for existing traders. The question, as always, is whether those commitments actually materialise in a meaningful way, or whether they exist mainly on paper while the reality on the ground tells a different story.
For the traders who were moved on, the reality has been brutal. Relocating a small business is not simply a matter of finding a new unit. Customer bases are built over years. Regulars know where to find you. When you move, especially if you move somewhere less central or less visible, you can lose everything you spent decades building. Several of the businesses that left the old shopping centre have not survived.
The wider concern is about what kind of city London is becoming. Housing costs have already pushed huge numbers of working-class Londoners out to the outer boroughs and beyond. As more central neighbourhoods are redeveloped with luxury flats and upmarket retail in mind, the communities that gave those areas their character find themselves with nowhere left to go.
Elephant and Castle is not the first place in London where this has happened, and it will not be the last. But its story is particularly sharp because the promises made to traders were so explicit, and because the community that has been affected is one that already faces significant barriers in terms of economic power and political influence.
As the first tenants move into the new development this month, the contrast is hard to ignore. Gleaming new storefronts where a chaotic, vibrant market once stood. Expensive flats where affordable community space used to be. And Diana Sach, looking up at buildings that replaced her world, wondering what exactly all of this was supposed to be for.