That reminds me a bit of The Harmsworth Room [1] in the Churchill War Rooms, where you can dine while you stare at the "original 1940s electric generator wall complete with dials and switches". Very cool space!
I'd been to the War Rooms decades ago, when they were simply a WWII restoration.
It was an obscure grim bunker where important decisions had been made during the worst period in 20th century British history.
I remember a small electric bell at an exit with a small sign "Immediate danger above if ringing". Just a warning not to go outside during bombings.
Apparently it's been gentrified to the point of ridiculousness.
The redeveloped Battersea Power Station is one of the most soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed places in all of London. This is a terrible place to put something like a music venue, unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth, and I think it speaks to Apple’s sanitised, emotionally-distant, luxury-focussed worldview that they would consider it.
Incredible building. Awful development. They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
The free U2 album looks like the work of a tastemaker by comparison.
I beg to differ. I stayed in Battersea for a week while exploring London. I found the place very welcoming, safe and inspiring. It’s convenient to get to and from with its dedicated underground line.
I can see how it fits the Apple
brand experience very well (they don’t do gritty stuff). In fact I believe there’s already an Apple Store there.
Come on now, when the rich go over to the artsy neighborhoods and fancy wine shops open up it's called "gentrification", but when they - actually a Malaysian group of investors - make their own place in a run down corner of London, a place that's accessible by public transport to anyone, and does justice to preserve the story of the power station, you call it grotesque.
It is absolutely still gentrification if you take one of the few places in London where people who work in lower-income jobs in London used to be able to afford to live and make it a luxury zone for unexplained wealth.
There are many gentrification complaints about that development and wider Battersea, and it has been an absolute legal battleground:
It's not actually the angle I was taking. Weirdly, considering it was driven by 1MDB, it's not an illegitimate or corrupt project in and of itself, and there's much more dodgy foreign money going into the rest of Battersea's redevelopment.
My complaint is what they built. It's a dreadful, dreadful project.
There's also a little local shop for the residents that stocks wine costing over £1000 a bottle.
What a weird complaint. I’ve been in grocery stores that have wine costing $500+/bottle. I would expect any wine shop to stock rare and expensive wines. Now, if that’s all they stocked, you might have a point.
If your corner shop sells wine that costs over £1000 a bottle I think you may very well be constitutionally unable to understand the point I am making.
I'm a local to the area, I agree with everything you're saying here (despite the weird backlash) and I know exactly which shop you mean. That shop is one of the most bizarre shops I've ever seen. It's branded as a "general store" but there's absolutely no household brands, everything is about 5x the normal price and all of the shoppers look like rich influencers? I have a theory that the store is used to trial new products before they go to the wider market
Well, the type of places that OP described are full of service people, paid the best wage that people with little training can make, because they can ALWAYS be nice and welcoming… even when being screamed at and spat upon by the rudest, meanest, and most despicable nepo-jerk you could imagine!
But, aside from the convenient access to the underground, I’m really intrigued by what you found “inspiring” about this place?
(I don’t know a single thing about it, never even heard of it, so I’m torn as to which of you two to believe… lol)
It's a combination of a park, a residential neighborhood and a shopping center in the renovated power station. The station is incredible building, with its brick construction. The residential buildings themselves are also special, with some designed by Frank Gehry, and the shopping center is inside the power station building and has an family-rated-steampunk feeling to it.
We stayed in an apartment overlooking the station front and it was a lovely sight.
I know someone who used to live in the new apartment development around the old power station; I think it is possibly the most soulless place I have ever visited. If you've seen The Good Place, then, eh, imagine a densified version of that, I suppose. It was really kind of amazing. Difficult to describe exactly why it was so off-putting, and I suppose tastes differ, but it really was unpleasant.
The power station itself is an impressive structure, mind you. But of all the things they could have done with it, it's a shame they did this.
I mean, you can say that Fred again and co. are "sanitised", "corpo music" and etc. But quite a lot of people will happily buy the tickets, and go to the concerts. The only reason I'm bringing him up, is cause Apple featured his live concert.
Obviously Apple is in the game of making money in the end. Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue. But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience. A lot of people will spend a couple of hundred $ for a fun night out, and they don't have to be extremely rich.
Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue.
This is a really tone-deaf straw man caricature of what I am saying, I'm afraid.
But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience.
It's a pretty solid, not even satirical summary of many of the people who live in that development. It's not really a place for Londoners.
If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.
I don't think Apple hopes to make significant revenue from ticket sales: this venue has seats for only 600. The purpose of the 600 seats is to give musicians optimal conditions for the creation of music (to be recorded or streamed live) and to showcase to selected audiences (e.g., journalists and other influencers) Apple's audio technologies: the venue is outfitted with a custom 48-speaker Spatial Audio sound system.
And like others are saying, it is at Battersea because Apple has about 500,000 sq ft of office space at Battersea. It's their UK headquarters.
If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.
So I live in California where everything is famously expensive (but I hear the same of London). $225 for a concert with a famous artist on a big tour is pretty standard. Oh, and since you clearly don't go to concerts, it's pretty standard for standing tickets to be more than seated, because they're usually closer to the stage and people want to stand around and dance.
I think their target audience are Apple Music subscribers who are going to watch the recordings of the live videos; they could probably care less who attend's their concerts. It doesn't seem like they want a music venue to support London's live music scene, but a music venue to produce content for their platform.
Frankly, that just makes it worse.
They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
oh, what the world could be like if music streaming platforms actually supported the industry that power them.
Ahh yes because the only destiny of large buildings in London is high-end retail and luxury flats for the wealthy. That's what holds us back as a country, isn't it? Not enough places for the very very very rich.
I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.
There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.
But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
I don’t want to dive into Reddit like territory but this is not a fair representation of the place. It is a shopping centre, yes, in the same vein as Westfield or any other created in the past twenty years. There is a Lego store, Uniqlo and many other normal high street stores [1] alongside higher end places but Sloane Street this is not. Throughout the year there are events in the riverside space with stalls from local traders and various other free events, especially for children.
I would argue that it is one of the more successful new developments in terms of “placemaking”, certainly in that part of London. It is very clearly targeted at the residents of the local area who are normal London middle class wealth. The little shop no doubt has bottles of expensive wine but it also has £10 ones.
For clarity; I’m not a resident of the area but have visited a bunch of times, especially with kids.
Making new places is hard and I think they’ve made a decent go of the place.
It turned into a luxury place because that's where the highest margins in construction are. Every developer wants to build high margin houses, nobody wants to build low margin houses.
City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.
If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.
It's not hard to imagine that not every derelict wreck has to turn into the new battersea power station. In fact, it's hard to think of a less inclusive redevelopment project in the UK than battersea power station.
Southwark is now full of purpose-built marginal tourist attractions. The big Ferris wheel. The springy Millenium Bridge. The Tate. The Globe Theater rebuild. And I see that the Oxo Tower has now put in a bar. Battersea itself now has a giant glass elevator that rises up one of the smokestacks and comes out the top. All the sights of historical importance are elsewhere.
I spent a few weeks in that area once. It's apparently less grungy now.
Yay, vertical integration! This shit needs to be stopped. Similarly to movie theaters and movie studios, venues, ticket providers and distributors/streamers/studios should not be allowed to be owned or controlled by the same entities.
OK, but the effect you are worried about won't be caused by Apple's owning 1 venue with a capacity of 600 people when there are many 100s of much larger venues.
If you like Art Deco and get get a chance to visit Control Room A, do so:
https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/control-room-a...
That reminds me a bit of The Harmsworth Room [1] in the Churchill War Rooms, where you can dine while you stare at the "original 1940s electric generator wall complete with dials and switches". Very cool space!
[1] https://www.churchillwarroomsvenuehire.co.uk/spaces/harmswor...
I'd been to the War Rooms decades ago, when they were simply a WWII restoration. It was an obscure grim bunker where important decisions had been made during the worst period in 20th century British history. I remember a small electric bell at an exit with a small sign "Immediate danger above if ringing". Just a warning not to go outside during bombings.
Apparently it's been gentrified to the point of ridiculousness.
Awesome, I hope they start to build a spatial concert library from this, as well as stream to their more popular devices.
Naomi Klein is the most vindicated nonfiction writer in modern history.
aka the good Naomi
“If your Naomi is Klein, then it’s green…”
How is she related to this story?
Out of the loop, what did Naomi write about this?
no logo
Strange they don't mention the Pink Floyd album in the article!
Oh dear.
The redeveloped Battersea Power Station is one of the most soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed places in all of London. This is a terrible place to put something like a music venue, unless your target market is the adult children of emigres with unexplained wealth, and I think it speaks to Apple’s sanitised, emotionally-distant, luxury-focussed worldview that they would consider it.
Incredible building. Awful development. They could have donated ten million quid to the Music Venue Trust instead.
The free U2 album looks like the work of a tastemaker by comparison.
Yeah I mean, they’re going to be playing the most bland corporate stuff anyway. It’s just advertising
I beg to differ. I stayed in Battersea for a week while exploring London. I found the place very welcoming, safe and inspiring. It’s convenient to get to and from with its dedicated underground line. I can see how it fits the Apple brand experience very well (they don’t do gritty stuff). In fact I believe there’s already an Apple Store there.
Of course there's an Apple Store there.
There's also a little local shop for the residents that stocks wine costing over £1000 a bottle.
It's a grotesque place.
No music venue in London is really "gritty" anymore but loads of them are under threat from developers and need all the help they can to survive.
Putting a music venue in the Battersea Power Station development is just making a music venue for the foreign money laundromat.
A shop selling expensive wine? What horror.
It's from a frightfully poor year as well
Come on now, when the rich go over to the artsy neighborhoods and fancy wine shops open up it's called "gentrification", but when they - actually a Malaysian group of investors - make their own place in a run down corner of London, a place that's accessible by public transport to anyone, and does justice to preserve the story of the power station, you call it grotesque.
It is absolutely still gentrification if you take one of the few places in London where people who work in lower-income jobs in London used to be able to afford to live and make it a luxury zone for unexplained wealth.
There are many gentrification complaints about that development and wider Battersea, and it has been an absolute legal battleground:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/20/develo...
It's not actually the angle I was taking. Weirdly, considering it was driven by 1MDB, it's not an illegitimate or corrupt project in and of itself, and there's much more dodgy foreign money going into the rest of Battersea's redevelopment.
My complaint is what they built. It's a dreadful, dreadful project.
What a weird complaint. I’ve been in grocery stores that have wine costing $500+/bottle. I would expect any wine shop to stock rare and expensive wines. Now, if that’s all they stocked, you might have a point.
If your corner shop sells wine that costs over £1000 a bottle I think you may very well be constitutionally unable to understand the point I am making.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/inside-britains-most-expensiv...
I'm a local to the area, I agree with everything you're saying here (despite the weird backlash) and I know exactly which shop you mean. That shop is one of the most bizarre shops I've ever seen. It's branded as a "general store" but there's absolutely no household brands, everything is about 5x the normal price and all of the shoppers look like rich influencers? I have a theory that the store is used to trial new products before they go to the wider market
Well, the type of places that OP described are full of service people, paid the best wage that people with little training can make, because they can ALWAYS be nice and welcoming… even when being screamed at and spat upon by the rudest, meanest, and most despicable nepo-jerk you could imagine!
But, aside from the convenient access to the underground, I’m really intrigued by what you found “inspiring” about this place?
(I don’t know a single thing about it, never even heard of it, so I’m torn as to which of you two to believe… lol)
It's a combination of a park, a residential neighborhood and a shopping center in the renovated power station. The station is incredible building, with its brick construction. The residential buildings themselves are also special, with some designed by Frank Gehry, and the shopping center is inside the power station building and has an family-rated-steampunk feeling to it.
We stayed in an apartment overlooking the station front and it was a lovely sight.
I know someone who used to live in the new apartment development around the old power station; I think it is possibly the most soulless place I have ever visited. If you've seen The Good Place, then, eh, imagine a densified version of that, I suppose. It was really kind of amazing. Difficult to describe exactly why it was so off-putting, and I suppose tastes differ, but it really was unpleasant.
The power station itself is an impressive structure, mind you. But of all the things they could have done with it, it's a shame they did this.
It's really difficult to put into words, isn't it?
There are many places in London that are equally wealth-drenched that manage to retain some charm, locality and aspiration to them.
Presumably they’re putting it there because their corporate office is in the power station too.
I mean, you can say that Fred again and co. are "sanitised", "corpo music" and etc. But quite a lot of people will happily buy the tickets, and go to the concerts. The only reason I'm bringing him up, is cause Apple featured his live concert.
Obviously Apple is in the game of making money in the end. Your local DJ that plays sets at 2am on a weekday probably won't be performing at their venue. But I wouldn't call every random friend group "adult children emigres with unexplained wealth" as a single target audience. A lot of people will spend a couple of hundred $ for a fun night out, and they don't have to be extremely rich.
This is a really tone-deaf straw man caricature of what I am saying, I'm afraid.
It's a pretty solid, not even satirical summary of many of the people who live in that development. It's not really a place for Londoners.
If I were a gambling man I would suggest to you that tickets for those events are likely to start at more than the couple of hundred dollars you are suggesting people spend without thinking. The cheapest standing tickets for the next Oasis tour (at very large music stadiums) are more than $225.
I don't think Apple hopes to make significant revenue from ticket sales: this venue has seats for only 600. The purpose of the 600 seats is to give musicians optimal conditions for the creation of music (to be recorded or streamed live) and to showcase to selected audiences (e.g., journalists and other influencers) Apple's audio technologies: the venue is outfitted with a custom 48-speaker Spatial Audio sound system.
And like others are saying, it is at Battersea because Apple has about 500,000 sq ft of office space at Battersea. It's their UK headquarters.
So I live in California where everything is famously expensive (but I hear the same of London). $225 for a concert with a famous artist on a big tour is pretty standard. Oh, and since you clearly don't go to concerts, it's pretty standard for standing tickets to be more than seated, because they're usually closer to the stage and people want to stand around and dance.
You... know they work there right?
I don't really see why this is relevant, but if it is relevant it reinforces my understanding of Apple's allergy to culture.
as soulless, dead-eyed and wealth-obsessed as the people that work at apple
Seems like on brand with Apple. You can now imagine how concerts will look like.
We can't wait to see how concerts will look like.
Apple just invented concerts, what will they think of next...
In their defense, soulless, dead-eyed, wealth-obsessed describes a lot of central London
Couldn’t disagree more
I think their target audience are Apple Music subscribers who are going to watch the recordings of the live videos; they could probably care less who attend's their concerts. It doesn't seem like they want a music venue to support London's live music scene, but a music venue to produce content for their platform.
Frankly, that just makes it worse.
oh, what the world could be like if music streaming platforms actually supported the industry that power them.
I suppose you’d prefer the power station to have remained a derelict wreck.
Honestly, people like you are what holds this country back.
Ahh yes because the only destiny of large buildings in London is high-end retail and luxury flats for the wealthy. That's what holds us back as a country, isn't it? Not enough places for the very very very rich.
I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.
There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.
But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.
I don’t want to dive into Reddit like territory but this is not a fair representation of the place. It is a shopping centre, yes, in the same vein as Westfield or any other created in the past twenty years. There is a Lego store, Uniqlo and many other normal high street stores [1] alongside higher end places but Sloane Street this is not. Throughout the year there are events in the riverside space with stalls from local traders and various other free events, especially for children.
I would argue that it is one of the more successful new developments in terms of “placemaking”, certainly in that part of London. It is very clearly targeted at the residents of the local area who are normal London middle class wealth. The little shop no doubt has bottles of expensive wine but it also has £10 ones.
For clarity; I’m not a resident of the area but have visited a bunch of times, especially with kids.
Making new places is hard and I think they’ve made a decent go of the place.
[1] https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/?retailertype=...
Ridiculous nonsense, twit.
It turned into a luxury place because that's where the highest margins in construction are. Every developer wants to build high margin houses, nobody wants to build low margin houses.
City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.
If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.
I personally see no issue with using prime real estate for… prime housing.
Affordable housing can be built somewhere that is actually… affordable.
It's not hard to imagine that not every derelict wreck has to turn into the new battersea power station. In fact, it's hard to think of a less inclusive redevelopment project in the UK than battersea power station.
Indeed. Absolutely sterile inside. They could have done so much more with it.
Proposed venue looks in keeping with this theme. Capacity of 600 and I'm sure whatever tickets will be priced to keep the hoi polloi away.
What would you have preferred the area become?
Southwark is now full of purpose-built marginal tourist attractions. The big Ferris wheel. The springy Millenium Bridge. The Tate. The Globe Theater rebuild. And I see that the Oxo Tower has now put in a bar. Battersea itself now has a giant glass elevator that rises up one of the smokestacks and comes out the top. All the sights of historical importance are elsewhere.
I spent a few weeks in that area once. It's apparently less grungy now.
Ah its the power station from Red Alert
Ah it’s the Wonder I always try to rush and can’t get to
Amongst other films a few scenes in the 1994 MacGuyver movie (Lost Treasure of Atlantis) were filmed inside the power station before it was renovated.
Yay, vertical integration! This shit needs to be stopped. Similarly to movie theaters and movie studios, venues, ticket providers and distributors/streamers/studios should not be allowed to be owned or controlled by the same entities.
OK, but the effect you are worried about won't be caused by Apple's owning 1 venue with a capacity of 600 people when there are many 100s of much larger venues.
Would an iDevice be required to enter? /s