Property News · April 4, 2017

The property billboards that reveal the truth about Britain’s luxury housing market


The glossy advertising around high-end building sites in major cities show expensive developments bustling with white thirtysomethings. Who are they aimed at, exactly?‘We don’t do ordinary,” declares the billboard at the entrance to the Battersea power station building site in London, where cranes are busy conjuring up a new world of 3,500 homes, 150 shops and 15,000 jobs from the mud. After standing derelict for decades, Giles Gilbert Scott’s majestic temple to electricity will soon be surrounded by a forest of luxury apartment blocks, some in the shape of thrashing metallic flowers by Frank Gehry, another like a writhing glass snake by Norman Foster, all clustered around a plunging piazza by Bjarke Ingels. It is a heady cocktail of competing forms and egos that will make the gargantuan brick cathedral seem almost humble in comparison.It is true that the developers of Europe’s largest regeneration project don’t appear to do ordinary. But they don’t seem to do many black people either. In the computer-generated visions emblazoned across the site hoardings, the bustling cafe-lined streets are inhabited by an almost entirely monocultural society of white thirtysomethings. Women with long blond hair and shopping bags, occasionally accessorised with prams, fill the foreground of a scene drenched with that scorching Miami sunshine so familiar to this part of Britain’s capital. “New exciting concept coming soon,” coos another billboard over a vacant shopfront where this tableau is intended to unfold. The new real-estate concept of ethnic cleansing. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…The property billboards that reveal the truth about Britain’s luxury housing market

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