The Sultan’s Elephant

Central London stops for a truly amazing spectacle

‘The Sultan’s Elephant’ was a huge-scale puppet show (read as ‘amazing piece of street theatre’) that closed today after three days in the centre of the west-end of London. Featuring a ten-metre-high mechanical ‘time-travelling’ elephant and a five metre little girl who’s spaceship had crashed into the tarmac at Pall Mall, stitching cars to the tarmac with rope, roaming around the west end and generally causing an upscale meleé we were really glad to have caught it’s culmination this afternoon. Not really being big on TV these days (UKNova is our VCR) we were totally unaware of it happening until my sister in Newcastle asked if we were going, having seen it on the Beeb's news site...

Kudos to Sarah, as we are so glad we did get along.. Wonderful to see the elephant give it’s good-bye’s to the little girl as she made her escape in the Jules Verne moonshot, with really excellent music being played live by a band sat in the trailer pulled by the Heffalump. Genuinely moving. Who cares about wires? - CGI has nothing on this sort of thing. I hope there are many other chances to see summer happenings like this in the future. Staged by Royal De Luxe, this is theatre, ingenuity and spectacle at its best.

I took some pictures in the crowd today but they won’t be nearly as good as the ones already flooding onto Flickr, so if you want to see more of the fabulous Dalí-like creations, click the photo link below.

Pictures of the three day event on Flickr

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