Photoshopping Battersea Power Station

The above is a cameraphone snap (from the Building Centre) of a model of Nicholas Grimshaw's new London Bridge station.  Here, even the shiny-shiny Shard becomes neutrally white, a backdrop to the glinting silver concourse canopies.  And the Shard is there to suggest certain values (modernity, commerce, soi-disant iconism) that the model wishes to appropriate for the station.  The Shard also helps the viewer locate London Bridge within London (which is interestingly the inverse of how the Tube map operates).  The whole model is resolutely dirt-free (even those troublesome trains), pristine and futuristic. Note also that the station itself is shown as snaking along smooth curve of wood.  It has become a giant Brio set.  Simple, clean, wholesome.  Single-Varietal London Organic Bridge Station.

Photoshop'd shots of buildings are the scale model of the twentieth century.

Shame it's the twenty-first century.

A few propaganda Photoshops of the soon-to-be-immured-with-flats Battersea Power Station have emerged.

Reading this image similarly, distance in London is collapsed until the Battersea flats appear moments from the Eye, and but a gentle curve onwards to the Shard.  The bottom quarter or so is verdant parkland.  There're no people from this perspective. There's hardly a vehicle to be seen (perhaps a few toy-like London buses on Chelsea Bridge), and certainly no trains whatsoever rumbling their way within metres of those shiny glass curtain walls.  Whereas most of London is under a somewhat grey and troubled sky, blesséd Battersea sits is a pool of golden sun.

Separately, those new flats look just like what the Doozers were building in Fraggle Rock.

A further shot is awash with happier, more productive Photoshop People busily having a simply super time in the little riverside park on the north side of the Power Station.

Zooming in reveals the sort-of charming clumsiness in the image manipulation, a dollop of glue on an architectural model.

Everyone's a bit ugly, and, more menacingly, no-one is old.  Apparently the future will be like a scene from Logan's Run.

Can't wait.  And helpfully, we don't have to.  One can apparently access a Pop Up Park in the grounds of the Power Station this summer.

Stupid name.  Single-Varietal Pop Up Organic Park is much better.