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.
In fact, looking at rents on RightMove, it's not out of whack with typical rents for a nice area of London.
Let us not forget this area of London (Nine Elms) was previously a pretty grotty industrial wasteland that you tended not to go to, and the power station itself was at risk of collapse.
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.
Malaysians poured £10bn into that hole, and the only tennants who'll give them the smallest chance of recouping that money are trillion dollar multinationals.
It's a shame though. The best shopping centres are the ones full of dodgy little shops but they're long gone in new builds now. Cambridge used to have a few good examples but they've all been pushed out.
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I spent a few weeks in that area once. It's apparently less grungy now.
The Millennium Wheel, that is a tourist attraction, obviously, and is a slightly odd experience and not terribly cheap but it's accessible to everyone. The Globe Theatre is pretty grounded in London culture and is really affordable.
The springy bridge is a functional thing that goes between the City and the more affordable and touristy bits of Bankside.
Tate Modern is IMO a triumph. Free to enter and chock-full of properly amazing stuff that is free to view. (Go see "In Search of Vanished Blood" by Nalini Malani). There are other free galleries along that side including in the development around the Oxo tower.
For all the glitzy aspects and the touristy bits, it actually still feels at least a little like London (and is just round the corner from both normal working London and heritage London).
None of that is even close to being as soul-deadened as the Battersea Power Station development, which exists outside culture.
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.
You can get there by boat if you're in another better connected part of Central London.
Seems like on brand with Apple. You can now imagine how concerts will look like.
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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.
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.
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Honestly, people like you are what holds this country back.
https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/control-room-a...
[1] https://www.churchillwarroomsvenuehire.co.uk/spaces/harmswor...
squints
> The big Ferris wheel.
Surely Lambeth.
> The Tate.
Modern? Yes. Britain? No, that's Westminster.
> And I see that the Oxo Tower has now put in a bar.
Hasn't it had a bar since it opened one in 1996?
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!
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.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/inside-britains-most-expensiv...
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.
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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)
We stayed in an apartment overlooking the station front and it was a lovely sight.
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure why I am replying to a sentence formulated like this but you surely understand I said nothing about $400, the top 20% of income levels, or even not being able to afford it?
If you’re going to disagree with me it might be better to disagree with what I said, not a straw man you constructed for the purpose.
I know that this is a common way to argue here on HN but it’s just weird.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/20/develo...
Affordable housing can be built somewhere that is actually… affordable.
You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.
As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".
Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.
That is basically the story of the London property market.
I don't have that much of a problem with it, tbh - before the development it was a weird light industrial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city. Now it's a weird bland commercial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city.
And we've lost Marco Polo House, the home of QVC, and gained Apple. Seems about a wash in terms of cultural value as well.
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 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=...
> 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.
Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.
That isn't me. I am not complaining about anything and everything. I am complaining about one specific place.
> Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.
I wrote that comment because I have been there. And my fear isn't foreign people — not remotely. My fear is foreign unexplained wealth — one of London's biggest and most intractible problems. It's not xenophobia, it's the corrupting influence of dubious, hard-to-trace oligarch-connected money being sloshed around in the London Laundromat.
The Battersea Power Station project is legit — all done legally — but the project was literally built by people not exactly tenuously associated with 1MDB. And as with many of these developments, many of the people who live in those expensive flats will be doing so thanks to money that was ill-gotten through proximity to power elsewhere in the world.
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Apparently it's been gentrified to the point of ridiculousness.
In this case, while the Apple Concert Hall may superficially look like just another music venue (many of which are privately owned in their own right, obviously). But its musical programme will almost surely follow a different set of guiding principles, in conformance to how Apple wants to project their brand to consumers. And the goal itself of hosting live music performances takes second stage (heh) compared to that of marketing them for streaming consumption. Speaking of which: it's not mentioned in the article, but I would be _extremely_ surprised if Apple didn't make this move with Vision users in mind.
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.
Why would I respond to such a mischaracterisation except to say it was a mischaracterisation?
For clarity: I am not talking about affordability. I am talking about the profoundly anti-culture nature of that specific place and the people who can afford to live in it. As I said in my comment, there are other ways Apple could contribute to live music that didn't involve putting a pet music venue in such a soulless place.
It's called being charitable. Trying to understand what their point is and responding to that for the sake of advancing the conversation, rather than grinding it to a halt with pedantic quibbles over inaccuracies or poor phrasing.
I've never been so I can't really comment on the atmosphere of the building.
You made a pretty specific point and prediction about the price of tickets, which I responded to, but now you're not talking about affordability. Because the suggestion that they might not be doing the most soulless oligarchic thing ever in this place doesn't fit your doom narrative.
(of a given performance ticket)
I think you’re out of touch.
Normal people are experiencing housing stress, energy price shocks, and wondering who the hell buys a $19 strawberry.
I consider top 30-40% income bracket as ordinary people.
Oh dear me, this is funny. But not in a way you will understand.
I've been fortunate enough to work in some environments where you kinda get the gist of "how people function", and it has completely opened up my eyes. A single person who is experiencing housing stress, can buy $19 strawberry, be upset about gas prices, and also spend $400 on a concert.