Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. T aylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id.

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