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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

Some people just want to pay what others would consider way-too-much for things

It’s some kind of ostentatious display of wealth thing, applied to every day household items.

Wouldn’t want to be caught with the home brand sponges!

> 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.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/inside-britains-most-expensiv...

That’s what some people consider success: moving from merge beginnings where the corner stores plural stock $500 bottles of wine, to a good area where the corner store singular stocks $1000 bottles of wine.

And the general store also has bottles of wine costing 10-30 a bottle. I did always chuckle at the bottles of 1972 Petrus in the "fancy wine" section.

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.

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 think it is possibly the most soulless place I have ever visited.

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.

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