Sainsbury’s had also admitted that it expected 90 per cent of the store’s customers to be drawn in from outside Pimlico – Victoria, Mayfair, St James, the City and Chelsea. Inevitably such shoppers would be attracted by the spacious underground car park that was to be built.
Residents were upset not only by the height and bulk of the development and the traffic implications for surrounding streets but also by the impact it would surely have on local shops. Pimlico is relatively unusual in that it has a network of small shops, only a handful of which belong to chains. These independent shops are concentrated in and around Tachbrook Street, the traditional heart of the area, home to a daily market selling fish, fruit and vegetables since 1877. Pre-Sainsbury’s, the selection of some 165 shops was one that any urban area would envy. Whether you wanted to buy a newspaper, have keys cut, find freshly ground Parmesan, pick up a bouquet of flowers, get a prescription or source the ingredients for a special meal, you could do it in a small, convenient radius.
But what would become of these shops once Sainsbury’s had opened its titan store? With a gross trading floorspace of 30,000 square feet, and eight franchise shops below, it would have more than double the sales space of all the existing shops in Pimlico. It would also be five times larger than the existing Tesco round the corner. Local residents suggested to Sainsbury’s that it cut back the size of its proposed store while retaining the same proposed number of product lines. Sainsbury’s was already well represented in the area, they pointed out. There was, and still is, a vast, fully comprehensive Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms only 1½ miles south and a smaller Sainsbury’s in Victoria Street, ten minutes’ walk away. Why, local residents wondered, did Sainsbury’s need another huge store?
Supported by local objections, Westminster Council refused Sainsbury’s planning permission in 1996 and then again in 1997, when it submitted a second proposal with the number of flats reduced from 178 to 160. Sainsbury’s appealed against these decisions and the matter went to a local inquiry. There then ensued a David and Goliath struggle.
Not content simply to rely on Westminster Council to oppose the proposal, the local community got itself organised with an experienced planning consultant to put its case. It tempered well-reasoned, carefully assembled, knowledgeable planning arguments with the genuine, heartfelt concerns of local people. Through Pimlico FREDA, the local traders of Pimlico appealed to the inspector in charge of hearing the appeal. They represented all the little shops who worked hard and stayed up late to service the community: Buckles and Brogues, Gastronomia Italia, Park Lane Cleaners, Stanwells Homecare Centre, Sea Harvest Fisheries, Market News – the list went on. Their case had a common-sense logic to it. ‘We believe that our area is unique in central London with its local market and small businesses. Many of these facilities would be unable to survive the opening of another supermarket and therefore given the government’s policy of city centre rejuvenation, we feel we should be afforded the protection of such a policy. Unless of course we are to have lifeless local communities that are cultural and environmental deserts,’ they wrote. ‘The survival of our community is at stake. We canvass your support in our endeavours against this appeal by Sainsbury’s.’
But prospects didn’t look good for the objectors. Sainsbury’s clearly had a war chest of money to pay for the costs of the appeal and could afford the best planning and legal team that money could buy. The whole affair had become political too. The outcome of such planning appeals is usually determined by the planning inspector. Pimlico objectors had been informed in writing in 1996 that this would be the case. After the general election in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Secretary of State for Environment and Transport, had rescinded this decision and decided to ‘call in’ the appeal and personally determine its outcome. Questions were asked in the House of Commons by Tim Yeo, the shadow Environment spokesman. He pressed Mr Prescott to explain why he had intervened in this particular appeal, and asserted that four months after doing so Mr Prescott had met Lord Sainsbury, a well-known donor to the Labour Party. Mr Prescott confirmed to him that the subject of ‘mixed-use housing and retail development’ was amongst the topics discussed with the Sainsbury’s chairman. He also confirmed that he had held no similar meetings with objectors to Sainsbury’s Pimlico proposal. Mr Prescott seemed to be rather keen on listening to supermarkets. His department had just approved a scheme to build a huge and controversial out-of-town superstore near Richmond in Surrey. This had been hailed by planners and developers as Labour signalling that it was relaxing the tougher planning regulations imposed by the former Conservative Environment Secretary, John Gummer. In the event, the inquiry inspector found in favour of Sainsbury’s and Mr Prescott agreed. Sainsbury’s got the planning permission it was after.
Within ten days of Sainsbury’s opening, leaflets were dropping through Pimlico residents’ letterboxes. ‘Support your local shopkeepers and stalls,’ they read. Evidently, Pimlico’s independent shopkeepers were already feeling the pinch. Three months after Sainsbury’s opening, one local shopkeeper told me that his retail sales had dropped by 18 per cent and that he was increasingly dependent on restaurant wholesale orders for the viability of his business. The ultimate irony, effectively a two-fingered gesture to community objectors, was that this was no ordinary Sainsbury’s, rather a ‘marketplace’ store, in the mould of Sainsbury’s Market at Bluebird in the King’s Road. It was to be called the ‘Market at Pimlico’. It had ten of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘specialist counters’, including a master butcher, a fishmonger, a charcuterie and a hot carvery with ‘tailor-made’ sandwiches. The message seemed to be crystal clear. Why bother with Tachbrook market or any of the existing 165 local shops when you could drive past the lot of them and shop in Sainsbury’s marketplace? Who needs a thriving independent shopping centre when you can settle for Sainsbury’s counterfeit lookalike?
In the world of British supermarketing, there is a curious gender imbalance. The bulk of shoppers in supermarkets are women. Stores typically operate with a predominantly female workforce under a male manager. As you go up the supermarket tree to the people who make the decisions about what we will eat, the personnel become overwhelmingly male. When you get to chief executive level, you find a handful of fabulously well-remunerated men who are confident that they know more about what the average customer wants than she knows herself. In a sense they do. They can tell us what we want. They know they have a captive audience.
British supermarket chains say that they must be keeping consumers happy or else we would simply push away our trolleys and take our business elsewhere. As one industry commentator put it, ‘They [consumers] have voted with their feet – or rather their car keys – patronising the supermarkets and superstores at the expense of other outlets … The vast gleaming superstores … St Tesco on the roundabout, St Sainsbury at the interchange, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day – are the clearest possible evidence that consumers are getting what they want.’ It is true that in the UK, unlike every other country in Europe, food shopping, for a majority of people, has become synonymous with supermarket shopping. For many people, however, that state of affairs is not a matter of positive choice but the line of least resistance. In a 2001 Radio 4 poll, 71 per cent of listeners who phoned in agreed with the motion that ‘We would all be better off without supermarkets’. In 1999, research carried out by the retail consultancy Verdict revealed that six million shoppers – that’s one in four of all shoppers – were dissatisfied with the supermarket where they bought their groceries. Two million of these shoppers wanted to abandon shopping in superstores entirely. In 2003, a NOP poll conducted on behalf of the New Economics Foundation found that 70 per cent of respondents would prefer to shop locally rather than in an out-of-town
