Tesco’s profits crisis means that plans for 49 shiny new stores have been ditched. Where does that leave places such as Kirkby, Bridgwater and Wolverhampton, where regeneration schemes linked to the supermarket chain now lie in ruins?
John Harris wrote a lengthy article in the G2 section of this week’s Guardian about two intertwined stories connected to Tesco’s financial crisis.
The first concerns the demise of what has effectively become Britain’s only viable model of regeneration, staking everything on an “anchor store”. This is the one size fits all policy EDDC uses. Does anyone out there have a clue what might replace it?
Here are some key extracts and below is a link to the full article.
“By the mid-1990s, this regeneration strategy was well established: base your plans on an “anchor store” and attract one of the big four supermarkets. If you were lucky, whichever store had designs on your neighbourhood might extend its proposals to an entire retail development, and perhaps assent to a so-called Section 106 agreement (a reference to part of the 1990 Planning Act), and build not just a big store and a handful of satellite shops, but something for the local community: a new library, say, or a public square.
If you were less fortunate, you would just get a bog-standard supermarket. Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the crash of 2008 and beyond, this was how whole swaths of Britain were rebuilt, and Tesco led the charge, to the point that it sometimes seemed to be a wing of government, and some people began to fear the dystopia crystallised in the title of Andrew Simms’s best-selling book Tescopoly. Now, though, Tesco is in retreat, and its sudden withdrawal from scores of places has left behind resentment, anger and what feels like a strange state of shock.”
The other side of the story concerns the fate of places that had either pinned all their hopes on Tesco’s arrival, or opposed its plans from the start. Of his three examples of towns now blighted by abandoned Tesco sites (listed above), the one closest to home is Bridgewater.
“On a freezing Tuesday afternoon in Bridgwater, the Somerset town that sits next to the M5, 35 miles south-west of Bristol, I meet some of the people who have spent six years opposing the now-abandoned plans for their town centre. The first thing I see is a vast expanse of grey gravel, extending into the distance: what would have been a cluster of shops surrounding a new Tesco, on a site between the town centre and the old docks, and eating into a much-used park called the Brewery Field.”
“This used to be the site of a big leisure centre, the Sedgemoor Splash, built in 1991 and based around a huge swimming pool with slides and wave machines, which, say some locals, attracted visitors from as far away as South Wales. But in 2009, Sedgemoor district council announced it was to close, claiming it was losing money and in need of repairs. ……..”
“A replacement pool was promised, but it took more than three years to open, on the site of a school a mile and a half out of town, well away from most local bus routes. A facility for people with learning difficulties on Tesco’s intended site – owned by Somerset county council, which, for some reason, donated £20,000 to Tesco’s planning fees – also had to find a new home. Given that Bridgwater already has a Sainsbury’s, an Asda and a Morrisons – as well as eight other supermarkets of various sizes – there was widespread bafflement about why the town needed another. Party politics were also streaked through the story: though Sedgemoor council is Conservative-run, Bridgwater has a long tradition of Labour-voting, and local politicians felt the Tesco plan was yet another example of folly and stupidity being imposed from outside.”
“The borough council finally approved Tesco’s plans in February 2013. Then, at the end of last year, news leaked out that Tesco was not coming after all. For Labour councillors Brian Smedley and Ian Tucker, and Glen Burrows, a local woman who is one of the founders of Bridgwater Forward, there is a mixture of relief and seething frustration at how this story played out.”
““I’m glad; I’m really glad,” says Burrows. “But it was market forces that stopped Tesco, not the fact that we had a massive campaign, and we had all the arguments. The council should have listened to us, and they didn’t. That’s the biggest lesson: the fact that we’ve got a problem with democracy.””
Ring any bells?
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/03/betrayed-by-tesco-kirkby-bridgwater-wolverhampton-let-down-by-supermarket-regeneration
Tescopoly: How One Shop Came Out on Top and Why it Matters (Paperback – 29 Mar 2007) by Andrew Simms. ISBN: 978-1-84529-511-0
East Devon Watch 