Apple Music to open concert venue in Battersea Power Station

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.

Oh dear me, this is funny. But not in a way you will understand.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.