Paolozzi's Tottenham Court Road mosaics to be given a new life in Edinburgh

Gone are the days when weary Northern or Central  Line passengers would be greeted with these beautiful mosaics as they rode the escalators at Tottenham Court Road tube station. But soon you should be able to see Eduardo Paolozzi's work in  his home city, Edinburgh.

Good news in the Architect's Journal this week for all of us who miss the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics that covered the walls, tunnels and escalator shafts of Tottenham Court Road tube station in London .

These artworks, which date back to a refurbishment of the station in the early 1970s,  have all now been stripped out of the station as part of the Crossrail refurbishment and expansion scheme, not without much debate. Now it seems at least part of this much-loved work is to have a new home - in Edinburgh, where Paolozzi was born, and where he went to art school in the 1940s.

The AJ story is a fascinating read: apparently the remains of the mosaics are now being stored at the London Transport Museum, which has its own depot in Acton. It seems that some of them - the mosaics around the arches at the top of the main escalators - will be restored and re-used in a new construction project at Edinburgh University's Art Collection.

It was always a lovely surprise to me to see these glimmering mosaics as you ascended out of the gloomy depths of the Northern Line. Those grand classical arches around the escalator well, encrusted with Paolozzi's coloured tiles, looked like they belonged in some grand byzantine Church, or even San Marco in Venice.

Apparently we might have to wait a few years before the restored mosaics are on view again - but it will be worth the wait.

Here are a few of the mosaics that you might be able to see again - but there's a wonderful photo archive of the mosaics in place on the previously mentioned London Transport Museum website.

Elephant subways go, along with their lovely tiles

Oh the deep dark secrets of the Elephant! Never again will we be able to enjoy them, or fear them, in the way we once did.

Read on the excellent LondonSE1 community blog that three more subways at Elephant & Castle shopping centre have been closed as redevelopment of the area continues.

Apparently there are now only three of the old subways left open - the ones beneath the New Kent Road and the centre, and two to the island in the middle of the roundabout.

Not many people seem likely to lament the loss of the formerly pink-clad shopping centre and its multiplicity of tiled and muraled pedestrian underpasses, but I for one am sad.

I got to know the centre back in the 70s when I  worked as a clerical assistant on the sixth floor of the DHSS hq, Alexander Fleming House, while Keith Jospeh was health secretary.

This great building, one of Ernő Goldfinger's designs, which seemed so new and tall then, is now a pygmy apartment block looking up coyly towards the show-off high-rise stuff being erected all round. But it was once the centrepiece of this area - watch this fascinating documentary from BBC 4.

Yeah, I'm sad, especial at the idea that the centre and all those new Latino businesses that have sprung up will be pushed out…and sad at the loss of that tiled subterranean world. Just as I was sad to see the almost Romanesque tunnels and arches of Tottenham Court Road tube station swept away to be replaced the the New Clean Sleek stuff of the Crossrail era.

To find out what's going to happen at the Elephant, you will need to negotiate a series of flashy, flash-rich websites, saturating with this joint effort between the London Borough of Southwark and developers, Lend Lease. If you want to know what's happening to the shopping centre, you will need to navigate through the fragrant shallows of the retail group Delancey which bought the centre (in a 50:50 deal with APG) two years ago.

It doesn't actually tell you very much, and there's no mention of the subways at all. I wonder what they've done to all those lovely coloured tiles….maybe they will re-use them?

lol. (the photos that  illustrate this were taken back in 2014).