Chapter Thirteen
Elephant & Castle
The Sign No One Can Explain and the Crossroads That Kept It
Why is Elephant & Castle called Elephant & Castle?
In brief: Elephant & Castle comes from the sign and name of a prominent roadside inn. The deeper origin of the sign is uncertain; the familiar Infanta of Castile explanation is not supported by reliable evidence.
Transport context: London Underground and National Rail station.
On 21 March 1765, the court of the Manor of Walworth meets at the Elephant and Castle in Newington.
The clerk writes the place into the record because a court requires an address. He does not explain the elephant. He does not identify the castle. He does not know that the few words needed to locate a meeting will outlive the manor, the inn, the village and almost every building visible from its door.1
The name arrives in history already wearing a disguise.
This is why it has attracted explanations. An elephant carrying a castle is too strange to be left alone. London prefers an origin that can be repeated over dinner: a Spanish princess, perhaps, her title Infanta de Castilla softened by English mouths until it becomes Elephant and Castle. Eleanor of Castile is usually invited into the story, though she died almost five centuries before the surviving record of the Newington inn. Sometimes the sign is attached instead to the Worshipful Company of Cutlers, whose arms include an elephant and castle because ivory was used for knife handles. Both stories possess the shape of an answer. Neither has evidence connecting it to this particular public house.2
The honest beginning is less obedient.
There was an inn. It had a sign. No surviving document tells us why that sign was chosen.
Before the elephant, there is a blacksmith.
In 1641 or 1642, John Flaxman is permitted to build a workshop on waste ground beside the road at Newington. He is to pay four shillings a year, the money going to the parish poor. The arrangement is modest enough to enter a manorial record and disappear from most other histories. Yet the site is well chosen. Roads are converging here from the City, Westminster, Kent and the southern counties. Where roads meet, horses need shoes, harness needs repair and travellers need information before they need architecture.3
By 1672 the place is associated with another farrier and is known as the White Horse. That name is practical. A horse painted on a board can be recognised by a traveller who cannot read and by one who has read enough for the day. Public-house signs belong to a London in which an image must perform the work later given to a street number, a printed timetable and a luminous station roundel.
The workshop stands beyond the dense city but not beyond its appetite. To the north lie St George’s Fields and the approaches to London Bridge. To the south, the roads divide towards Kennington, Walworth and the country beyond. Newington is still a parish and a village, its name meaning a newer settlement, though there is nothing new about it by the seventeenth century. The City is near enough to supply customers and far enough away to make departure feel possible.
Then London begins improving the roads.
London Road is formed across St George’s Fields in the eighteenth century. The New Kent Road follows in the early 1750s, giving traffic from Kent a more direct approach towards Westminster Bridge and the western parts of the capital. The old road junction does not become orderly. It becomes useful. Coaches, carts, drovers, riders and pedestrians arrive from different directions and attempt to leave by others. Dust rises in dry weather; ruts hold water in rain. The blacksmith’s ground is no longer merely beside a road. It is at a decision.4
At some point around 1760, the smithy becomes an inn and the White Horse becomes the Elephant and Castle. By 1765 George Frost is associated with the house and the manor court can use its name without further instruction.5
The sign itself is old. Elephants carrying towers appear in medieval and early modern imagery, heraldry and trade. Europeans knew that war elephants had borne fighting platforms, but knowledge was mixed with distance. Artists who had never seen an elephant supplied it with feet, ears and proportions borrowed from more familiar creatures. A castle on its back completed the marvel. The emblem was used by guilds and commercial bodies and appeared on inns in more than one part of Britain. It did not need to commemorate a princess. It needed to be memorable.6
At Newington, it succeeds beyond measure.
A public house is not only a place to drink. It is shelter, waiting room, hiring point, parcel office, meeting place and landmark. A coach can depart from an inn because passengers know where to gather and carriers know where to leave goods. A stranger asking the way may not understand the boundaries of Walworth manor or the parish of St Mary Newington, but he can be directed towards the elephant.
The sign becomes larger than the building that carries it.
Soon people are not merely drinking at the Elephant and Castle. They are travelling through the Elephant and Castle. Then they are living near it. The name loosens itself from the inn and settles over the junction.
The Man Whose Sign Ate a Village
George Frost enters the story because records require somebody to hold a licence, pay a rent or answer a court. They do not tell us why he chose the sign.
This absence has consequences.
If Frost had written a letter explaining that the elephant came from an inn he had known as a child, a cutler among his customers, a print on his wall or an arbitrary choice from a sign painter’s pattern book, several centuries of speculation would collapse. He wrote no such letter, or none survives. His name appears in local records; it has not been found among the apprentices of the Cutlers’ Company or the records of the Farriers’ Company in a way that would secure either popular theory. The man remains less famous than the animal outside his door.7
There is something appropriately London about this reversal.
Landowners name squares after themselves and expect gratitude. Monarchs lend titles to roads before the paving is finished. George Frost appears to have intended nothing more permanent than a recognisable house of business. Yet his sign begins to consume the older geography.
Newington does not vanish. It remains in Newington Causeway, Newington Butts and the parish history. But the junction develops another identity, one that can be spoken quickly by drivers and printed compactly on tickets. The Elephant is more vivid than the New Town.
The inn is rebuilt in 1816, when the surrounding traffic has become too important for the older house. It is rebuilt again in 1898, this time as an exuberant public building suited to a district that no longer resembles a rural edge. Each reconstruction presents itself as the Elephant and Castle. Continuity resides not in bricks but in the sign.8
By the nineteenth century the crossroads is one of the great distributing points of south London. Horse buses gather and depart. Tramways draw rails through the streets. Shops, theatres, music halls and eating houses cluster where movement supplies an audience. The district acquires the confidence and congestion of a centre without possessing the ceremonial spaces by which centres usually announce themselves.
The railway arrives first above ground. The London, Chatham and Dover Railway opens a station nearby in 1863, and another form of traffic joins the road. But the more consequential arrival comes beneath it.
On 18 December 1890, the City and South London Railway begins carrying passengers between Stockwell and King William Street. It is the world’s first successful deep-level electric railway. Steam, tolerable in shallow cut-and-cover tunnels only with difficulty, cannot be used in the narrow tubes driven through London clay. Electric locomotives pull small carriages through darkness below the streets. The windows are high and the interiors cramped; one early nickname is the padded cell. Yet the railway proves that a city may construct another system of movement underneath the one that has become impossible above.9
Elephant & Castle is one of its original stations.
The name has now travelled from a painted board to a railway diagram. The process changes its authority. An inn sign can be removed. A station name is repeated by companies, conductors, ticket clerks and passengers. It enters timetables. It appears on walls. It is carried in pockets.
A second underground railway reaches the junction on 5 August 1906. The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway has already been compressed by newspaper writers into the Bakerloo, a name that sounds old because London has accepted it quickly. Its southern terminus opens at Elephant & Castle in a building faced with the dark red glazed tiles used by architect Leslie Green to make the new electric railways visible at street level.10
Two different tubes now meet beneath a name whose meaning nobody can establish.
The junction continues to accumulate transport. Trams pass in such numbers that the Elephant becomes inseparable from their wires, bells and stopping places. Buses inherit the routes. The roads are widened, redirected and widened again. Planners repeatedly approach the district as a problem of circulation, as if enough concrete could persuade Londoners to stop arriving from several directions at once.
The old inn survives until 1959. It has been rebuilt so thoroughly that little of George Frost’s house can remain, but the emblem still stands above it: an elephant with a castle on its back. When the building is demolished during the remaking of the junction, the sculpture is saved. In 1965 it is placed outside the new Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, a modern retail complex that promises a weatherproof future while borrowing its identity from an eighteenth-century public house.11
The act is more revealing than the architecture.
The district can lose the building and preserve the sign. It can demolish the inn, construct a shopping centre, remove the shopping centre and continue calling the place Elephant & Castle. The name no longer requires an object to explain it. It has become the explanation for everything around it.
This creates a peculiar kind of certainty.
We know when the words appear in the local record. We can follow the smithy, the White Horse, the inn, the road junction and the stations. We can describe how the sign became a district. What we cannot do is take the final step backwards and identify the thought in George Frost’s mind, or in the mind of whoever selected the emblem before him.
The gap should remain.
London place names often survive because they are useful. This one survives because usefulness joined strangeness. A traveller remembers an elephant more readily than a parish boundary. A driver can shout it above traffic. A railway can fit it onto a tiled panel. Generations repeat the words until the question inside them becomes almost inaudible.
At the station today, the name performs several duties at once. It identifies two Underground lines, a National Rail station, a road junction and a neighbourhood whose boundaries remain negotiable. The modern entrances do not resemble one another. Passengers can emerge on different sides of the traffic and briefly suspect that they have arrived at different places.
Above them, London continues doing what it has done here for centuries: approaching, dividing, waiting and moving on.
There was once a blacksmith beside the road. Then a white horse. Then an elephant carrying a castle.
The first two have gone.
No one can prove where the third came from.
London kept it anyway.
Notes and Sources
Stephen Humphrey, Elephant and Castle: A History (Amberley Publishing, 2013), and Survey of London, “St George’s Fields: Formation of the roads”. The earliest surviving local use commonly cited is the Manor of Walworth court held at “Elephant and Castle, Newington” on 21 March 1765.↩
London SE1, “Elephant & Castle: local historian debunks Infanta myth”, reporting Stephen Humphrey’s archival research. The popular derivation from La Infanta de Castilla has no documentary basis, and Humphrey found no evidence connecting the Newington inn to the Cutlers’ Company.↩
Survey of London, “St George’s Fields: Formation of the roads”, on John Flaxman’s early-1640s workshop, its four-shilling annual payment for the parish poor, and the later use of the site by a farrier.↩
Survey of London, “St George’s Fields: Formation of the roads”, on London Road, New Kent Road and the development of the junction. The New Kent Road was authorised and laid out in the early 1750s to improve the approach from Kent towards Westminster Bridge.↩
Survey of London, “St George’s Fields: Formation of the roads”. The survey dates the conversion of the smithy into an inn and its renaming to approximately 1760; the house is securely recorded under the Elephant and Castle name in 1765.↩
Jacqueline Simpson, Green Men & White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names (Random House, 2011), on pictorial inn signs and the widespread elephant-and-castle emblem. The Cutlers’ Company and other organisations used related imagery, but that general history does not establish the origin of the Newington sign.↩
Stephen Humphrey, Elephant and Castle: A History (2013), summarised in London SE1, “Elephant & Castle: local historian debunks Infanta myth”. George Frost appears in local records, but the archival trail does not support the occupational connections often used to explain his sign.↩
Stephen Humphrey, Elephant and Castle: A History (2013), and Historic England Archive, “The Elephant and Castle statue outside the new shopping centre”. The inn was rebuilt in 1816 and again in 1898 before its twentieth-century demolition.↩
London Transport Museum, “Public transport in Victorian London — underground”, and “A very short history of the Underground”. Electric traction made the City and South London Railway, opened in 1890, the first successful deep-level electric tube railway.↩
London Transport Museum, “The Bakerloo line”. The line opened in 1906 and was extended from its temporary southern terminus to Elephant & Castle on 5 August; the surface building follows Leslie Green’s characteristic ox-blood faience treatment.↩
Historic England Archive, “The Elephant and Castle statue outside the new shopping centre”. The archive photograph records the salvaged inn sign in its new setting in 1965 after the Victorian public house had been demolished.↩