Elephant Park
Central London’s New Green Heart
Elephant Park
Overview:
Over a 15-year period, Lendlease and Southwark Council’s regeneration of London’s Elephant and Castle district, will create nearly 3,000 new homes, 160,000 square feet of retail space, and generate around 5,000 new jobs in the local area.
We were tasked with branding and marketing the transformation of the largest single area within this regeneration, the Heygate Estate. And to date we have created a fully integrated suite of materials across all media, to support the schemes first two phases.
Prior to the creation of any marketing materials, our first challenges were to position and name the whole scheme. We calculated that the new park at the heart of the scheme, would be the largest created in Central London in 70 years. This combined with Lend Lease’s leading commitment to sustainability and reducing the environmental impact of its activities, resulted in our creation of the central marketing thought; ‘London’s greenest new place to live’
We then named the scheme Elephant Park, to deliberately challenge and contradict the historical image of this corner of London as being rather grey, rundown, and anything but green,
A visual style was developed to express Elephant Park’s unique blend of unrivalled greenery with urban modernity – a nod to its proximity to the cultural hub of the South Bank and the creative vibe of the immediate area. The resulting word mark and pixelated image style, were deliberately fresh, future-facing, and original.
In the creation of what was a broad ranging, integrated suite of marketing materials, we eschewed the traditional sales brochure in favour of creating a more editorially-oriented publication, Elephant Park magazine, in print and subsequently as an app. This served as the core ongoing communication piece, blending both lifestyle editorial appeal and product information. The website mirrored this approach, and also acted as the hub for social media communication.
We also conceived and produced a highly distinctive preview launch event, around the theme of ‘an evening in the park’. Invites were printed on seeded plant-able paper. We turfed the whole floor of Lendlease’s 24th-floor office space, curated sustainability demonstrations, and served park-themed canapés. The showcase of the evening was a 50 metre long projection of a film and animation onto the soon-to-be demolished Heygate Estate, depicting the vision for the new Elephant Park.
The ‘Live in the park’ theme was then continued through our design of an ‘experience suite’ – a multi-functional space and sales office featuring a large-scale touch-screen wall showcase, and even a floor-to-ceiling tree with surrounding park bench.
