At night the sound of traffic swirls with a waterfall constancy, as vehicles are sucked in to complete revolutions of this enormous plug hole.
I have recently moved to Elephant and Castle, one of London's major roundabout intersections. Staring out of the window at this cacophony of cars is compulsive and strangely hypnotic, flaring up all kinds of imagistic potential - red buses lurching like whales around shoals of nimble cyclists; vehicles thrown into and expelled from the junction as though it were a pinball game exercising its slingshot effect. And so on.
Yet on an overcast, miserly February day (such as when I write this), I can't help but deduce that this must surely rank as one of the most amazingly dreary pockets in the whole of London. A visiting friend made the canny observation that it is how he would have imagined the inner cities of Eastern Europe to look in the 1970s. Through the cloud and drizzle the terrain takes on the appearance of being some kind of colossal ashtray into which has been stubbed out huge concrete cigarettes.
Contemplating this scenery long enough I become acutely aware of the powerful psychological forces that begin to exert themselves; underpinning my psyche into the absolute urbanity of my situation. Just beyond the window, the unyielding climate of motion, activity and the very 'rat race' itself leaves me sweltering in an intensely contrasting state of repose, the accentuating of my sedition.
In tandem with this, its easy to survey from my vantage point, the dense proximity of myself to multitudes of other residents; the honeycomb apartment blocks that flank the roundabout exemplifying the strictures of our urban condition. (I feel sure there are all manner of psychological studies that hypothesise the highly-populated living conditions not being conducive to mental well-being and instead paradoxically heightening the sense of alienation.)
However, all I am minded to think about Elephant & Castle thus far is the extent to which it stands on the diving board of change. A matter of months from now the Heygate Estate - an archetypal monument to urban decay - will have been razed to the ground with the Shopping Centre swiftly following suit.
All as part of a concerted effort to emboss and embellish the entire area with the lifeblood of financialisation, an exercise in metropolitan assimilation that can be evinced all over London from Brixton to Hackney. Before long, E&C, with its prime location in terms of the City and the financial heartland, will have been driven through the car wash of gentrification, any existent community or character scrubbed away by the soap sponges of capital and property investors.
Walking through the shabby and dishevelled shopping centre, I get the feeling that the area is submerged in an anaesthetic fog just waiting for the cosmetic surgeons to hack away at the sagging breast tissue before injecting the silicone stream of property capital, young accountancy graduates and artisan cafes. When the work is done, the end result will be idealised, perfect and fake.
Inside the shopping centre, there is the standard cheap terrazzo flooring, the walls are painted with murals of pink elephants, reminiscent of the hallucinatory dancing elephants from 'Dumbo', a gloriously lysergic sequence in an otherwise innocuous Disney film. The few shops that remain are so down-at-heel that the whole place almost serves as a synecdoche of a society in which consumerism was rejected as being a waste of human energy.
Down in the subway, which stretches like atrophied roots under the roundabout topsoil, the implied threat of physical violence permeates as a tacit possibility just waiting to gestate into reality. The psychedelic ceramic tile arrangements and bizarre paintings depicting garden parties and thriving dockyards do little to assuage this ambience of unease, almost acting as a transference technique from the immediate threat felt by the area to the individual.
Surfacing in the pupil of the roundabout I feel a psychic connection to the protagonist in J.G. Ballard's novel 'Concrete Island', who finds himself stranded Crusoe-esque on a wasteground island surrounded by the ceaseless ebb and flow of urban infrastructure that remains oblivious to his plight.
Instead, the space plays host to the Michael Faraday Memorial, an ugly stainless steel wart that serves as a dubious monument to the Victorian-era scientist, justified as such since it contains an electrical substation for the Northern and Bakerloo lines. (The erroneous rumour that it was once inhabited by Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, I find far more satisfying.)
From this perspective one can observe the Strata tower, a prime example of the bland 'logo buildings' that have lanced up around London over recent years. I can no longer set eyes on it without visualising a giant Monty Python thumb descending from the clouds to depress the top section as though it were an aerosol spray can.
You are able to view the local pubs spaced apart at easy stumbling distance. The Charlie Chaplin (a place so ramshackle that the last time it was renovated must have been when its famous namesake had a film out in the cinema); the Elephant & Castle (the eponymous riding inn); and the Rockingham Arms, part of the Wetherspoons reclamation (for my money, with its plate-glass windows and dead-eyed clientele, possibly the most horrifyingly generic pub in London).
The latter pub is wedged in beneath the apartment complex which I now call home. The building was originally known as Alexander Fleming House and designed by the Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger, a Marxist who was inspired to create 'social architecture', of the kind that became synonymous with the subsequently derided Brutalist form.
Such ambitious social aims of the 1960s interweaved rather cogently with the Department of Health which adopted it as their headquarters. Standing there in the centre of the piazza the building embodies the overbearing, transparent form that would be expected from a building of the state. The clinical palette of the building is achieved by anti-septic white infused with ribbons of fluoride blue, as though a hospital corridor or a dentist's waiting room had been thrown up into its idealised structural form. Whereas, at night, the glazed bridges that act as bonds between the blocks appear like the gantries and gangways at a Cape Canaveral shuttle launch.
A glorious irony is present in the fact that this Department of Health structure was struck by the malady of 'sick building syndrome' - a situation in which occupants experience acute health and comfort affects and yet no specific illness or cause can be reliably identified. Most often these are due to flaws inherent in the heating, ventilation or air-conditioning systems.
Although, I wonder whether it might also have been the psychological disjuncture that began to seep in like a malignant damp, the occupants being faced with such persistent transitory displays from their position of perhaps complete statis? Might these office-bound civil servants filing records and other bureaucratic memoranda have been struck down by the malaise of appearing to be silo-ed in their interminable routine as the fast-moving world rolled on and on and on past them?
In any case, the building was eventually overhauled and cosmetically enhanced (in a foretelling of the fate awaiting the area as a whole), to become apartments for 'young professionals' and given the fabulously bland name Metro Central Heights that makes it sound like it should be situated in downtown Los Angeles. And certainly, as I observe the pulse of traffic pumping through the concrete aorta and off to a different limb of London, I can't help but be reminded of that auto-compulsive metropolis.
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