Metro Central Heights (originally Alexander Flemming House) Designed by Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger
The Strata Tower, new Futurist style construction right in the centre of Elephant & Castle. Designed to be eco-efficient, thanks to the three wind turbines that will be placed at the very top of the tower. More information can be found in this link.
Heygate Estate. Built in the 1970s as a social housing development. This estate is to be completely demolished and new, affordable housing built in its place. Originally designed as a Utopian development for the post war housing solution, this estate had since declined in to a crime ridden area and is now in its final stages of planning for redevelopment. This link has lots of information on the redevelopment project by Southwark council. This re-generation process has taken a long time to get underway, and is long over due the planned start of the redevelopment. There has been a fair amount of criticism levelled at Southwark Council, especially by the residents of the Heygate Estate, both current and former residents, especially about the lack of alternative housing offered to the residents who are relocating. A very interesting blog by a former resident that has been keeping a record of all the developments regarding this project can be found here.
Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre (with Hannibal House a-top). A 1960s development, with the aspiration as the model for all future retail centres, and the first of its kind in Europe. Judging by this Time-Out article, it hasn't been the most enthusiastically received. This centre is also due for demolition and re-development as part of Southwark council's plans.
After a recent meeting with Gary last Tuesday, he has also kindly allowed me to post some of his ideas for this film:
Buried Dead, Broken Bottles
‘My knowledge of the world exists effectively only at the moment when I act to transform the world’ - Raoul Vaneigem
"tourists make films about places they do not know, film-makers make places into films about what they know."
I intend to make a film about a place, to weave a film using fragments of documented reality, lyrical narrative and fleeting visual impressions. I want to reject the institutions of narrative and documentary films and make something in the interzone between. Like Alexandre Astruc’s notion of the camera-pen, or Charles Madges notion of the ‘poet-reporter’ it will be an informal essay on the interconnectedness of everything in a poeticist-expository style.
The film will be set in T.S. Eliott’s wasteland, contemporary London seen through the eyes of one of Baudelaire’s ‘flaneurs’. This character will serve to supply the subjectivity needed to interpret the snippets of London’s history that I will include in the film. Iain Sinclair once said that London “buries its dead, and forgets where they lie.” This reminds me of a line from Chris Marker’s film Sunless: “History throws its empty bottles out the window.” I want to make a film about the buried dead and broken bottles, like Walter Benjamin, I think that the discarded and forgotten fragments of a society can tell you more about it than tourist information boards and blue plaques.
The film is an attempt to subjectively transform space to show how beautiful it could be, if only... It is a film made out of topography, a fictional mapping of a real place and an attempt to turn the city’s everyday trappings into urban poetry. In a way I want to take Astruc’s notion of the camera pen (or indeed the magic marker out of Chris Marker’s name) and use it like a vandal uses spray paint to poeticize the urban landscape. To be more specific, I will use the inherent surrealism of montage to draw lines between seemingly separate aspects of the landscape to reveal the hidden narrative.
Though some of the themes that arise will be political and philosophical, these will not be overt, the politics of every day life.
With the above statement, as to Gary's initial intent with the film, I am starting to realise the difficulties that arise with trying to "capture" the urban soundscape. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the sound of the environment around Elephant & Castle is very much...um [fuck it, I think it is] polluted by the "noise" (and I'll use that in the sense of undesirable sound), of traffic and aeroplanes overhead. Gary's quote about a fictional mapping of a real place and an attempt to turn the city’s everyday trappings into urban poetry is a really commendable idea, and so my initial plan was to document the urban soundscape by recording sounds of the environment and through the sensitive composition of these sounds, attempt to lift the sounds from every day mediocrity into a poetic and beautiful artistic statement; to reveal the hidden delights of the city. However, the recordings that I have made are not revelatory, and comprising a ten minute sound track, to accompany the images, from these sounds will, I fear, soon become quite dull. It seems that the urban sound environment around Elephant & Castle is monopolised by one music taste, and that's the combustion engine.
The thing is, I really want to share Gary's idea that if you really become aware of your surroundings, stop and look, and really listen, and take note, you can appreciate a place (even one as devoid of elegance as Elephant & Castle).
Elephant & Castle is being redeveloped, not because it is a destination, but because of its proximity to London's attractions. Unfortunately, I have to admit, that this is how I feel about the area, it's the location that matters. Why I travel there is for Uni, it's a staging area, or a through road to somewhere else more exotic and wonderful.
But then I think of artists who have successfully turned the banal into beauty. Artists like Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, and Jeff Koonz. I think that maybe it is possible to do this. But then sound is a very different animal than sight. With the camera, you can block out what you don't want and frame what you do, sound has no discrimination. Case in point, I went to the Haygate Estate in an attempt to document its desolation and emptiness. What I recorded instead, was not the lack of sound, or emptiness, but the very pronounced fullness of sound; of planes, trains and automobiles (great film, btw). These sounds are so conspicuous because they are forever present, like liquid they flow and shape to the container so that any gaps are filled.
An option might be to go and record sound in the area, very late at night or early in the morning when traffic is at its minimum, however, I am a little concerned of walking around on my own, with expensive gear. Then again aren't artists supposed to get punched in the face and robbed, for their art?
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