the small, local shops that remain, survival gets ever more complicated too. Small shops have to try to survive a campaign of attrition. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s they had to see off not just the first wave of supermarket openings but also the second and third as rival chains competed for market share in their area. The drastically reduced number of small shops that have survived that period now have to watch these supermarket chains replicating like mutants in a sci-fi film as they extend and refurbish existing stores out of town and set up new ones in smaller sizes and formats in the high street. Life isn’t getting any easier for independent shopkeepers.
The term ‘company town’ was coined by historians to describe centres of population made distinctive by the one-dimensional nature of their employment opportunities and the predominance of the large companies that controlled them. Nowadays it may be more apt to distinguish places not according to how locals earn their money, but by how they spend it. Few British towns have a distinctive sense of place any longer. Most have become trolley towns, shaped by the grocery chains that dominate them.
What does a trolley town look like? Approach any significant centre of population in the UK and you must pass through the supermarket ring. The first thing that greets you is not some distinctive civic monument or landmark but the now familiar supermarket sprawl, complete with its new roundabouts, altered road layout, traffic signals with changed priorities, petrol station and sea of parking. Welcome to Asdatown, or Tescotown, or Sainsburytown. Make it into the centre of one of these places and you’re in Anytown, Anywhere. Or even Clonetown. You’ll search to find anything approximating to a small greengrocer, fishmonger or butcher. These have been replaced by charity shops, video shops and, in more affluent centres, branches of large retail chains. This is the new urban landscape our large supermarket chains have bequeathed us.
Dundee is a typical trolley town, or city. Once an important port at the mouth of the River Tay, its heyday was during the industrial revolution. Dundee’s reputation was built on the three Js: jam, jute and journalism. By dint of its seafaring history, Dundee claims the credit for introducing Britain to the delights of jam made from imported exotic fruits, otherwise known as marmalade. In the nineteenth century, its jute mills swelled its population. In the twentieth century, it was better known as the home of the Beano and the Dandy comics created by local publisher D. C. Thomson. Now Dundee has a population of around 165,000. On paper, it is an interesting place to live in and visit, and not short of visual attractions. It has the silvery Tay itself and the Tay Rail Bridge, a dark mass of sturdy Victorian metal. You can still see the stump of its notorious predecessor, the one that collapsed into the river. You can visit the historic sailing ship the Discovery, famed for its early exploration of the Arctic. But the first thing that hits you when you approach Dundee from any direction these days is not this unique and impressive heritage but supermarkets.
In the 1990s Dundee was home to William Low, a Scottish supermarket chain with relatively small stores throughout the country. It was acquired by Tesco as a quick way for it to build its base in Scotland and compete with the then dominant chain, Safeway. Soon the whole look of Dundee started to change. Locals were amazed when, after the council had spent lots of money improving the approaches to the city, planting floral displays, landscaping and so on, Tesco got planning permission for a superstore on the city’s most desirable and scenic location, Riverside Drive, with its long, open views over the Tay. Then Asda started flexing its muscles and Sainsbury’s entered the fray. Now most key routes through and past Dundee seem to lead to vast supermarkets. They loom so large that they dwarf the city’s outstanding historic and civic heritage. The city struggles to put itself on the tourist map, and no wonder: to the visitor, it might look as though the main occupation of its residents is supermarket shopping.
Dundee city centre consists of an area of about half a square mile, large parts of which are pedestrianised. At either end, like sentinels, stand two shopping malls, tenanted with a familiar litany of chain shops – Carphone Warehouse, Claire’s Accessories, Clinton Cards and so on. Fast-food chains are also well represented. Most of the small shop units that remain in the centre have been turned into pubs or amusement centres, or charity or video rental shops.
In the 1960s, before the large UK-wide supermarket chains managed to persuade Dundee’s impoverished city council, desperate for cash, to let them have their way, this area was a thriving centre for food shopping. There were ten bakers; now there are two left. There were eight or nine butchers; now there is one. Of the five fishmongers, one has survived. Where there were half a dozen grocers, one remains. Food shoppers – as opposed to food grazers – will find little to sustain them in Dundee city centre these days.
When I visited Dundee in 2003, the city had four Tescos, two Safeways, two Asdas, one Sainsbury’s, one Marks & Spencer and a clutch of discount and low-price outlets. Asda had submitted a planning application to build a third store on a greenfield site. It had commissioned a traffic-impact study to support its application and was reported to be ‘ready and waiting’ to state its case to councillors when it came before the planning committee. Residents, meanwhile, had formed an action group to oppose the application. Not to be left out of Dundee’s supermarket mêlée, Morrisons was also in talks with the city council over its application to build a further 90,000-square-foot superstore in the city, close in scale to a Tesco Extra or an Asda superstore. Since both the Asda and Morrisons proposed sites were on council land, Dundee City Council stood to receive a substantial windfall from the sales. ‘Some estimates have put the amount the local authority stands to make at anywhere between £15 and £20 million,’ reported the Evening Telegraph. Dundee clearly did not need any more supermarkets. Yet with this sort of money to play for, you could see why councillors might be sorely tempted to say yes to a couple more.
As it stands, any Dundonian who wants to shop in independent outlets must travel to Broughty Ferry, now effectively a prosperous suburb of the city and home to a thriving rump of small shops that have so far been sheltered from the city’s supermarket revolution. Here independent shopkeepers are endlessly resourceful in thinking up new ways of seeing off the supermarket threat. ‘We [independent traders] are relying on the overall viability of the area by creating a food shopping cluster,’ baker Martin Goodfellow told me. A few doors along, David Craig has reinvented his butcher’s shop, Robertson’s, as a mini Harrods food hall on the Tay, and it is renowned for its exceptional range and personal service. Both men are optimistic that they can hold the line against the supermarkets, but with new superstores opening and existing ones being extended, they remain far from complacent.
Wherever you go now in the UK, you will find cities and towns whose vitality has been drained by supermarkets. Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent:
I live in East Anglia where the progress of convenience shopping has had a visible effect on the quality of life. My nearest town, Diss, has two supermarkets, squatting each side of the thoroughfare that passes near the town centre. One is adequate, the other cheap but hilariously awful. As a result of their presence, the main shopping street of a market town of 6,000 people consists almost entirely of charity shops, estate agents and, mysteriously, a number of greetings card emporia. As they go out of business, small retailers complain that the life of the town is draining away, but the planning authorities remain unimpressed. It has just been announced that Tesco has been given permission to build another vast superstore beside the main road.
Writing in The Grocer, James Millar drew attention to the irony of the situation where he lived in Gloucestershire. ‘A recent survey has just pronounced my local town, Tetbury, the third most desirable place to live in the UK. Tetbury, undeniably, is a nice place to live. Yet the only places you can buy apples, cauliflowers or a bag of potatoes are the local Somerfield and the almighty new Tesco. The fruit and vegetable shop has
