George Monbiot writes in today’s Guardian.
I have been writing about it for years. But it’s only now, when I’m caught in the middle of it, that the full force of this injustice hits me. Like everyone else here I feel powerless, unstrung as I watch disaster unfolding in slow motion.
There’s a similar battle going on in Bedminster, about 3 miles from where we live. And Tesco will win. They always win.
Local authorities usually only have themselves to blame when their town centres die…
…since the arrival of an out of town superstore always seems to be ‘coincidentally’ paralleled by an intensive “war on the motorist” in the traditional town centre, designed to make any attempt to shop ‘in town’ unless you actually live within 5 minutes of the high street on foot either completely impossible or grossly unpleasant.
Personally I don’t want to have to park 20 minutes away on foot and pay £2 to park in order to pick up a pint of milk or a magazine. Nor do I want a half hour walk carrying a number of heavy and rapidly defrosting shopping bags in order to get back to my car. So I don’t bother going to the high street at all. Buying on the internet and going to Tescos or Somerfields, large edge of town venues with free car-parks, where I can wheel a whole trolley load oc cheap comestibles a hundred yards to my tailgate, even under a canopy if it is raining, all rate as easier and cheaper than even thinking about heading in to town to shop.
Nobody made the council spend a fortune narrowing the roads, widening the pavements or painting double yellows everywhere. Nor did it make them hire revenue-generating traffic enforcement staff. Nor did anybody make them raise the tarriff in their off-street car-parks from ‘nominal’ to ‘serious disincentive’. But somebody convinced them it was all a good idea. I wonder if that somebody’s stars were mysteriously aligned with the Tesco board’s astrological chart or something?
The town centre is fundamentally dead, by the way, as is the high street. Mostly empty, a few charity shops, and there’s be no footfall at all if there wasn’t a bank and the main post office half way along the road. The new wider pavements made of expensively imported designer light coloured granite are mostly empty. The ‘traffic problem’ has been completely solved – it has pretty much all been diverted to the new Tescos Extra (and the old but recently revamped/rebranded Somerfield (nee Safeway), almost certainly never to return.
Got a similar game of Tescopoly going on in Newport Pagnell. The old Aston Martin site (they moved production up to Gayden a couple of years ago) was originally down as a residential and small business development. Then came the credit crunch so the developers who bought the land were left holding an expensive chunk of land with no prospect of anything happening on it for quite a while. So they sold it to Tescos, who appeared out of the blue announcing a new superstore for the site (just round the corner from me). The response from local residents has been pretty unanimous: we don’t want it, and can’t understand what Tesco have to gain from it, given they have about four superstores in Milton Keynes already. If they had come in and put a small Express outlet in the old Woolworths store on the High Street, everyone would have been fairly happy (apart from the two other small supermarkets in town). A superstore is just too big for the area, will only draw customers away from their existing stores, and the extra heavy goods traffic to the site will be bloody disruptive. Currently, the opposition has caught Tesco on the hop, so they’ve withdrawn the proposal before it came before the MK Council Planning Committe later this month. But it will be back, sneaking in when the opposition has run out of steam. Newport High Street has struggled a bit since Woolworths closed: a Tesco superstore will kill it completely, another community with its guts eviscerated to Tesco’s insatiable greed.
Similar situation here. Bristol City Football Club want to build a new stadium at the end of our village (which is a whole different fight), and they were planning to sell the old ground for housing to fund it. Along comes the recession, and no developer can afford to develop, and in steps Mr Leahy on his white charger.
Bedminster has an Aldi, a Lidl and a Sainsburys. It also has a greengrocer, a butcher, a deli, a couple of small electrical retailers and a thriving community on North Street. It’s where we do our shopping in preference to supermarkets. Now it will be destroyed by cars, by 24 hour deliveries, and the shops will really struggle. I don’t think any resident wants it – they are already well served by supermarkets – but the council wants the new footie stadium so they can compete in the World Cup (daft buggers), and so the planning consent will go through.
And then we residents of Long Ashton will be the proud neighbours of the bloody football ground, with its planned rock concerts and its lack of proper road access and its insufficient parking buggering up our village. Lovely.