The newest Arcade food hall is so vast that it is concerning; so vast that it feels like being hurled into a physicalised Deliveroo interface; so vast that it makes your head hurt.
Wedged up on the first floor of the new Battersea Power Station, it is a 500-cover, horizonless sprawl of hatch kitchens, pocket restaurants and bars that occasions a sense of insignificance and a kind of vicarious nervousness on behalf of the hospitality group tasked with filling it. What is the plan? Who is going to come here? Why, like much of this enormous, sparsely peopled cathedral of mega-mall blandness, does it resemble an elaborate loss-leader? If the idea is to make a diner feel like a kid in a candy store then, amid the glossy desolation of a quiet Wednesday lunchtime, the misfortune is that this specifically applies to those weirdly empty ones that line Oxford Street.
