Elephant & Castle Town Centre | New Mixed-Used Development

This regeneration project seizes a rare opportunity to create a new town centre in central London – overcoming some very complicated structural and geotechnical challenges.

When the Elephant & Castle shopping centre opened in 1965, it was the first of its kind of Europe. Londoners flocked to browse more than 100 stores over three levels of covered arcades, away from the traffic and noise of one of the city’s busiest junctions.

Over the following decades, the junction grew ever busier but the novelty of the shopping centre wore off. By the time clients of the developer Delancey acquired the site in 2013, London’s southern gateway was enviably well-connected but quite rundown. The wider Elephant & Castle area was also the scene of a major housing regeneration project – and it needed a new “front door”.

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Location

London, United Kingdom

Client

Get Living

Architect

Allies and Morrison

Project Status

Under construction

Developer

Delancey

Certifications

BREEAM Excellent

Now owned by Get Living, with Delancey as the appointed development manager, the scheme will replace the shopping centre with three residential towers, an office and retail podium, a cinema, a new tube entrance to replace the existing one, and a new building for London College of Communication, part of University of the Arts London. The development will allow the prestigious College, which has been based in Elephant & Castle since 1962, to build on its work as a global leader for the education of design, media and screen and better engage with local audiences, as well as creating a truly mixed-use development. There was only a narrow margin of public realm around the original shopping centre. In contrast, the new masterplan for Elephant & Castle town centre will create a permeable network of pedestrian streets and a new public square, intended to become a vibrant, 24/7 neighborhood.

London is always growing, and there are not many undeveloped town centre sites left in zone one. This is a project like no other, in the opportunity it brings and the sheer mix of uses.

Richard Palmer Development Director, Delancey

Richard Palmer Development Director, Delancey

It’s a unique opportunity to reshape London’s southern gateway, but also a major endeavor. “There are a huge amount of development constraints on the site, so to be able to bring forward something of this scale is pretty special,” says development director Richard Palmer. As well as fitting within London’s protected viewing corridors, all of the buildings and below-ground structures must be woven through a tapestry of active transport links, not to mention an underground river. “We are straddling over the Tube infrastructure with very little headroom, so it’s quite a challenge – but quite exciting at the same time.”

As the structural and geotechnical engineer on the project, responsible for what goes on above and below the ground, WSP is playing an essential role in making it happen…

Charting a Route Through Complexity

Elephant & Castle is a key transport interchange for south London, with a mainline rail station, the Bakerloo and Northern underground lines and many bus routes. All of this infrastructure runs directly adjacent, above and below the site – and had to remain operational throughout construction.

As well as being responsible for the structural design of all of the buildings, WSP is also the geotechnical engineer. “Underneath the site, there’s a series of tunnels, so we’re involved in assessing their movement and making sure they’re not affected by what we’re doing,” explains project director Audrey McIver. “All the structures are designed to span over them, and we also set controls for the construction – specifying what monitoring needs to take place, and the sequence in which all the different elements will be constructed.”

Meanwhile, WSP’s transport team has been working with Transport for London to replan pedestrian and bus routes around the building work. “They’ll do pedestrian comfort flows to see how people will move around, and make sure they have enough space.”

New homes

983

PROJECTED EMBODIED CARBON SAVED (TONNES)

2,500

Site area (gross, sqm)

196,836

Building the Future of London’s Infrastructure

All of this coordination means that people passing through Elephant & Castle station today are probably not aware that a massive excavation is taking place just metres away. This will eventually house a five-storey basement and a new integrated ticket hall. This has capacity for the underground lines that serve the station, and to become an important interchange for the planned extension of the Bakerloo Line into southeast London, a part of the city that has been historically underserved. “This is a genuinely mixed-use project, but it isn’t just about all the things we’re building for now, it’s also about building the future of London’s infrastructure,” says McIver.

Today, the Bakerloo Line terminates at Elephant & Castle, and the sidings are just below the town centre site. “The new university building directly straddles them, and one of the residential towers is straddling the five-storey basement box,” she says. “It’s down to our structural expertise that it can be built safely, that the sidings will not be affected and that all the requirements of third parties like Transport for London and Network Rail are met.”

Uncovering – And Taming – A Lost River

Another subterranean surprise is the River Neckinger – one of the lost rivers of London. Centuries of diversion and development along its course have reduced its flow, but it was still significant enough to present some big engineering challenges.

The water pressure under the site is very high, explains McIver, and it will need to be continually dewatered during excavation. All of the building structures have been designed to resist this elevated pressure, and WSP’s geotechnical team has carried out extensive modelling of how the ground conditions will change.

Taming the river is a major challenge in its own right. Contractor Multiplex will move to 24-hour working for the construction of the ticket hall, to complete the excavation and waterproofing as quickly as possible and minimize any risk from movement to the Bakerloo Line tunnels below.

Maximizing Recycled Steel to Reduce Carbon

Reusing steel components from demolished buildings can significantly reduce the amount of virgin materials required for a building, and therefore its embodied carbon. The difficulty is reconciling what’s available at the scrapyard to what’s required for the new structure.

“You’ll never find exactly the same beam, you just want one that is acceptable, of the right size and depth. But it’s how you set those parameters,” explains McIver. “You might find a piece of steel that’s an 80% match for location A, but as you carry on down the list, you find it’s a better match for location B and then you have to start all over again.”

To overcome this, WSP has created a digital design tool that matches the whole building at once, and can even determine whether it would be better to cut a beam in half so it can be used in two different locations: “It can do automatically what it would take a person days or weeks to do.” The WSP team worked with Multiplex and European Metals Recycling (EMR) to refine the tool, optimizing its benefit to the project.

The project originally had a total of 372 tonnes of designed steel, and by substituting 20% of this with reclaimed steel, the team will be able to achieve a projected saving of circa 125 tonnes of CO2e (A1-A3).