Five-a-Day: Day 16: 20th of February 2023

Last weekend, I decided to do some sightseeing. I moved to London in October, but I haven’t been the best tourist so far. I’m not the most proactive person, and my idea of a nice weekend is spending hours in a cafe reading, learning and writing, and then making a nice meal in the evening. But I felt this weekend that I should probably go beyond the ten minute walk radius that I usually inhabit and see some of the sights that London has to offer. One of the places that I decided to visit was the recently redeveloped and repurposed Battersea Power Station. I’d heard good things and it looked lovely on Instagram, so I thought it was worth checking out. Now, I’m probably a fairly cynical person, all things being considered, but I think by anyone’s standards the Power Station is underwhelming, and actually quite depressing. It’s essentially just been converted into a range of extremely expensive apartments and a shopping centre of all the most generic brands you can think of. I think it says something about our society that we celebrate the opening of a collection of chain brand stores as if it’s some exciting new attraction. Anything you can find in there you can throw a stick anywhere in London and hit five of them. It’s disheartening that we can’t think of more productive, active and interesting things to use our public spaces for, beyond shopping, eating and drinking. Don’t we have enough chain stores? Don’t we have enough restaurants? Why can’t we find new and exciting and creative uses for the spaces that we all share, rather than submitting to the short-termist goal of immediate profit? Maybe next time.