There’s faint live music as I walk into Battersea Power Station. Around the corner from Apple’s giant, glass-fronted reception area, a man is performing an extremely committed rendition of Modest Mussorgsky’s “The Great Gate of Kyiv” on a public piano to a crowd of exactly three people, in the middle of an enormous shopping center. It’s an interesting reversal of fate: an up-town mall that once may have played classical music to keep certain crowds out, deploying the same music to lure them back.


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Hugh Morris is a freelance writer and editor based in London.