Lowri Griffiths Visits the Redeveloped London Landmark, Buys Nothing, Thinks About Gentrification for the Tube Ride Home

I Have Been to Battersea Power Station and I Have Complicated Feelings

Battersea Power Station is genuinely beautiful. This is the first thing to establish. The four chimneys, the brick facade, the interior spaces that have been opened into a kind of cathedral of retail and food — it is a spectacular building that has been given a second life in a way that respects its architectural scale while filling it with exactly the kind of premium-to-luxury commercial offering that makes economic sense given what it cost to redevelop it and what the surrounding residential development costs to buy. These two things — architectural brilliance and financial logic — are not in tension with each other, which is my complicated feeling, or the beginning of it.

What Is Inside

Inside Battersea Power Station you can buy: clothing at a range of price points where “accessible” means two hundred pounds; food at restaurants that are excellent and priced at a level where two people with wine spend eighty to a hundred and twenty pounds; a flat, if you have several million pounds and want to live inside a power station, which some people genuinely do, and I respect this choice while noting that it is not available to me or anyone I have met in three years of North London renting. The turbine hall, which is the centrepiece of the interior, is astonishing — a vast brick-and-iron space that has been preserved with a clarity of architectural intention that makes you understand what the building actually was and what it was capable of.

The complicated feeling is not about the building. It is about what it represents for South London, whose working-class character it was built to serve and whose gentrification it now anchors, and about whether the preservation of the building’s form while replacing its function with luxury retail and premium housing is preservation in any meaningful sense or a very expensive version of putting a nice frame around a memory of what used to be there. I don’t have an answer. I had a very good meal. I took the tube home thinking about it. This is London’s specific gift: it gives you the experience and then gives you the forty-minute journey home to decide what you think about it.

London development and life at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London property at City A.M.. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. Gentrification laughs at Newsthump.

London’s Version of Preservation

Battersea Power Station’s redevelopment sits in a long tradition of London building preservation that produces magnificent results and uncomfortable questions simultaneously. The Tate Modern is another: a power station turned into one of the world’s great contemporary art museums, which is genuinely wonderful and which sits in a neighbourhood where the Tate’s economic gravity has contributed to the pricing out of the working-class community that once lived around it. The question of whether preservation of a building that serves a different economic class than built it constitutes preservation of the building or replacement of it is not one that has a clean answer, and I am not offering one. What I am offering is the observation that London’s architectural heritage increasingly survives while its social heritage does not, and that this is not necessarily the wrong tradeoff — buildings last longer than social arrangements, and their preservation creates the context in which new social arrangements can form — but that it is a tradeoff, and the people who bear the cost of it are not always the people who celebrate the result. I am celebrating the result. I am thinking about who paid for it. Both at once, on the District line home, which is London’s gift to anyone who needs time to hold two things simultaneously without resolving them.

London does this to you, eventually. You arrive thinking you will master it — that you will find the affordable flat, the manageable commute, the market that still serves the neighbourhood, the cycle lane that doesn’t nearly kill you, the landmark that hasn’t been sold to someone richer. And what you actually find, after enough time, is that London is not a place you master. It is a place you negotiate — constantly, on its terms, with your own resources, doing your best with what’s available and adjusting when it changes and laughing, when you can, at the gap between what you expected and what you got. I expected a city. I got this city. It is, despite everything and including everything, exactly what I came for. Though I am still looking for the flat.

Three years in North London and I am still surprised by it, which I think is the right pace. If you stop being surprised by London you have either mastered it, which is impossible, or stopped paying attention, which is a waste. The people who have been here for thirty years and claim to have figured it out are the people who have decided which parts to pay attention to and have stopped noticing the rest. I am not there yet. I am still noticing the man asleep standing up, and the cycling near-miss, and the impossible canelé price, and the Battersea turbine hall at dusk when the light comes through the Victorian brick and the scaffolding of a new flat development is visible through the industrial windows and the whole thing is beautiful and strange and specifically London in a way that I couldn’t have understood from Cardiff and that I am still, three years in, only beginning to understand here. This is fine. This is, actually, exactly fine.