To Exist Is To Pay Rent. To Live Is To Buy An Aesop Candle And Go Pilates
and once you've done that we can think about a place to play sport and hang out... as long as you post about it on Instagram!!!
I have recently moved to North London. Spending more time in Central, my initial thoughts have been about how London’s quite different to Yorkshire and my uni city in the North East, Durham. But then, when I went to Battersea Power Station the other day, I thought again. As a newbie city girl, I don’t know much about London’s intimate social history, but I don’t necessarily need to to feel the malaise. London is just a surrealist parody of the UK’s socio-economic problems. That, and then waft some £145 incense to cover up the smell of human sewage because the shit is still everywhere.
When I went to the UK’s most prized high-end outlets, Bicester Village, for the first time the other month, I was bewildered at the hyper-reality of it all. It attracts the wannabe upper middle class in their financed Range Rovers and whatever the equivalent is for international commercial tourists.
The Bicester shopping experience plays into the aspiration and ‘magic’ of consumerist wealth. When you enter Bicester Village you enter another world. You go from fighting the inconsiderate povvos on the motorway to being tended to by a member of staff dressed in a red coat and top hat and a brass walking cane (yes red coat- but not like the Butlins Red Coats because these ones have a TOP HAT and a SHINY OO AH CANE). You belong to the upper middle class now, darling sweetie darling. Yah? You deserve that Vivienne Westwood bag- this is exactly what Vivienne herself would’ve wanted.
I soon got over the craziness of Bicester Village and tried to shirk that I’d succumbed to the transformative experience of it all. Once you leave Bicester Village, you leave it all behind. Again you’re a 20 year old student going home in a 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer but now you have an OO SHINY discounted! (nope, still expensive) Le Creuset pan sat on your lap and your brain battling the confusing cognitive dissonance going on.
My day out at Battersea Power Station was harder to shirk off. Firstly, I was going because I had seen adverts for it everywhere. Primarily from influencers on Instagram and TikTok and then reinforced through adverts in tube stations.
What’s the attraction? Battersea Power Station’s About section opens with the following statement:
At its peak, Battersea Power Station was supplying a fifth of London's electricity. After decades of sitting derelict, it is now open to the public as one of London's most exciting and innovative new destinations. The very building which once produced the energy that enabled people to eat, drink, shop and play in the City, now provides the venue for a new generation to do the same.
Is this development project reflecting social change or is it exploiting the deterioration of UK industry for commercial gain?
In previous academic literature, Geographer Harry Warick referred to Battersea Power Station as a ‘Cathedral of Power’. This metaphorically loaded title was proposed in the Orwellian/ Luddite sense that the Power Station was ‘birthing’ the machines which would see the demise of social life.
Today, Battersea Power Station remains the vagina in which the demise of social life is being birthed (it’s been a long labour). Building developers are the ones in charge now and their game is manufacturing social life as a means to achieve commercial success.
With Capitalism as the virus, radical individualism as the food and building developers as the host, the DNA of society gets manipulated. Developers must produce a ‘hegemonic cultural narrative’ to create a convincing hyper reality that can sell luxury apartments. This leads to the highly aestheticisation of the space and what stakes it has in human social life and then promoting them as the inarguable and inevitable way that we produce human social experiences. Developers have taken note that people are wanting an outlet to express their various individualistic successes. Individualistic successes often include the reward of social health.
Psychology Today defines social health as,
the aspect of overall well-being that stems from connection and community. It’s about having close bonds with family and friends, enjoying a sense of belonging to groups, and feeling supported, valued, and loved.
‘close bonds’, ‘sense of belonging’, ‘feeling supported…loved’ are assumed to be what a human innately desires and is bias towards.
In William Morris’s utopian society, these pure human emotional drives are the foundations to a perfect human society. Battersea Power Station is a microcosm of how you can never take what the developers are saying that they are trying to do with a space at face value. Capitalism and commercial gain are deeply entangled into our perceptions of social health. Perceptions of who deserves access to it and what social health looks like.
After 12 years of Conservatives in power, for Brits, more than ever, social health is the ultimate trophy. Under the lies that we live in a meritocratic society, that the people who deserve a good life are the ones that have the money to show for it. Battersea Power Station’s developers have the power to manipualte what social health even looks like; manipulating the aesthetic that communicates a human innately thriving. The development produces a vision aesthetically similar to Morris’ utopia through the creation of a new, revitalised place.
Let’s take thew PR marketing that is happening right now at Battersea Power Station. Up and coming trendy café chain, Blank Street is currently running a 2 month Rocket Padel pop-up at the Power Station to promote their new matcha menu. To participate in matcha themed Rocket Padel is free and you also get a free matcha from the cute Blank Street matcha van to refresh afterwards. What a fun FREE thing to do with friends, to meet up, to make memories and be active.
Isn’t it great to have a 3rd space where you can nurture your social health? Isn’t it strange though, that marketing has gotten to the point where companies are having to manufacture events to experience something that is meant to be innate to humans? That they’re able to make a successful marketing campaign because of the sheer novelty of experiencing a free 3rd space? Are we experiencing our innate human emotional experiences through PR or because of PR?
We know that we understand our identities in relation to the commodities we consume. I think that emotive marketing such as Blank Street’s is dystopian reality of the lack of what should be organically happening in society. The choice for this to PR to take place in a venue like Battersea Power Station when it is trying so hard to develop an utopian aesthetic of the social rules around social health is particularly telling. It is telling me that we are excited for companies to develop the aesthetics and social paradigms for us so that we can participate and compete within them.
Attending a PR pop-up like Blank Street gives the consumer the right to show off to their peers that they are a certain type of person who engages with brands certain type of brands and products. Blank Street didn’t create a 3rd space. There are too many social implications and ties. Sure, some people might attend even though they don’t like padel or engage with the whole trendy coffee/matcha ‘community’ that’s going on right now. What Blank Street has done is exploit what people are craving most from society and turning it into a new aesthetic that late stage capitalism has created.
It is in fact exacerbating the UK’s diabolical socio-economic crisis. Another example of irony at Battersea Power Station was that it hosts a Third Space gym. Not knowing what it was I took a pic and laughed.
This is Third Space’s blurb:
Third Space are London’s luxury health clubs; individual in style, bound by a common philosophy: to be the Third Space for our members, inspiring them to be their personal best.
Wowee! A space where you can escape all of the crazy povvo people in London and sit in a sauna after a blast on a Stair Master so you’re refreshed enough to return to your desk in Canary Wharf. To be your ‘personal best’ in a 3rd space is crazy. It’s anti-thetical in fact. 3rd spaces are about community and nurturing human connections that go beyond how you identify professionally, or where you stand financially. An exclusive healthclub that starts at 165 per month isn’t planning to serve a communal thinking is aiming to foster a bubble for people who share the ‘common philosophy’ about individualism works and that their is a hierarchy of the people who deserve access to social (and physical in this case) health.
Developers, PR and marketing are continuously exacerbating social fragmentation and pitting people against one another. It’s not just financial wealth that signals righteousness, it is the culture you subscribe to too.
This BRILLIANT! You are BRILLIANT!