as they were being accused of taking away business from town centres and encouraging traffic by means of such projects, supermarkets have reinvented themselves as urban regenerators with pockets deep enough to make long-cherished community goals possible. As The Grocer noted archly: ‘Regeneration projects can gain speedy approval from councils and local communities. A whole regeneration package, promising mixed use development … is likely to prove far more attractive to planners than just a plain old superstore.’ Our large supermarket chains’ enormous retail power certainly provides them with the money to make things happen. But the downside of these carrot-and-stick regeneration packages is that they are another way in which supermarkets are insinuating themselves into all aspects of our lives, embedding themselves deeper and deeper in our manmade landscape and hence our consciousness. In Kilmarnock in Scotland, for example, certain areas of the town are listed in local bus timetables according to the supermarket chain that dominates them: Wester Netherton has become Kwik Save and Scott Ellis has become Asda.
The supermarkets are happy to bask in their role as the new civic developers as long as they get their pound of retail flesh. But the price for planners and their communities is that they may have to say yes to a new store when they would otherwise prefer to say no. Where once people strolled in the park, or walked around the local duck pond, a day out in our supermarket-saturated country is beginning to mean a visit to a shopping and leisure centre of which a supermarket is an integral part. Naturally, supermarket chains are keen to promote their stores as places in which to while away leisure time. Under the headline ‘Everyone Asda have a hobby’, the freesheet Metro told the story of septuagenarian Richard Bunn who, after enjoying a bargain all-day breakfast at his local store in Weston-Super-Mare, had made his hobby visiting Asda stores. When he had travelled some 100,000 miles to visit all its stores in Britain, Asda grasped the public relations opportunity and asked Mr Bunn to open a new store in Oldbury in the West Midlands. ‘I know people think I’m batty but I love Asda and once I decided to visit every store, I became a man with a mission,’ Mr Bunn told assembled press.
If an obdurate local authority says no to a supermarket development, even if it is cloaked in a halo of urban revitalisation, supermarkets have further avenues to pursue. The original foot-in-the-door tactic was to construct smaller stores – which are more likely to get planning permission – that just happened to have ridiculously large numbers of parking places. This built in a generous margin of surplus land for future extensions. A few years later, the chain could apply to extend the original store into the car park. Little by little, the chain could realise its greater plan. Nowadays the buzz words are ‘space sweating’. Chains ‘sweat assets’ by building mezzanine floors in existing stores where they would not be allowed to extend externally. UK planning law excludes internal building work from the definition of development requiring planning permission. In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart announced its intention to build mezzanine floors in up to forty stores in what Dow Jones International News reported as ‘a way of increasing space amid strict planning laws’. After a successful mezzanine was slotted into its York store, Asda Wal-Mart set about building floors in stores in Sheffield, and Cumbernauld and Govan in Glasgow. In the Sheffield Asda, the mezzanine added 33,000 square feet to the store – almost the same sales area as the largest supermarket now permitted in Ireland. Friends of the Earth blew the whistle. ‘Asda Wal-Mart is making a mockery of planning guidance. By installing mezzanines in existing stores, the company does not even have to submit a planning application to the local authority. This leaves the local authority powerless to assess the impact on local shops or traffic levels and local communities have no say in the development,’ it pointed out. Sheffield MP Clive Betts told the House of Commons that the mezzanine expansion in his constituency had made existing traffic problems worse. ‘Traffic is considerably heavier, yet there has been no analysis or plan to deal with it, because there has been no requirement for the store to sit down with the highways authority and the planning authority to work out these problems, because there is no need for planning permission.’
Yet another approach is to include housing in proposals for extensions to existing stores. Sainsbury’s, for example, got the go-ahead to extend its Richmond store from an already substantial 55,000 square feet to 63,500 square feet largely because it would build 179 flats on top of the existing store and the extension.
Our supermarket chains are determined to get planning permission for new stores and extensions to existing ones. And despite the fact that theoretically they now operate in a tricky planning climate, it is amazing how often they get what they want. As Tesco’s finance director told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Planning approvals have not stopped. It’s just more difficult than it used to be. Out of town is very difficult to get but you are seeing brownfield sites redeveloped. Planning changes have not killed development. They have acted to redirect it.’
The battle against the building of a Sainsbury’s in Pimlico, on the site of the former Wilton Road bus garage behind Victoria Station, is one of the most high profile ever fought between a local community and a supermarket chain. Behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings in this controversial case, exposed by the Sunday Times investigative Insight team, made the front page. Simon Jenkins wrote a rousing column in the Evening Standard opposing the development as an unwelcome precedent. ‘The store is big, intrusive and will offer parking, thus contriving to offend every maxim of modern planning … A superstore is a neutron bomb. It wipes out commercial life for streets around, while its parking spaces jam the traffic … Quite apart from encouraging more traffic, most of the new stores are large and ugly. That they may replace ugly gas works or goods yards is no excuse,’ he wrote. The debate continued on BBC2’s Newsnight. It was rare for a local community to make such a stand. But Sainsbury’s got its way in the end.
Local residents first got wind of the proposal in 1995. Sainsbury’s had been smart. It had got together with a housing association to put forward a mixed development for a superstore with flats built above it. Half these flats would be private, but the other half would be low-cost, affordable housing, of which there was a serious shortage in the area. This type of housing had been given the highest priority in the local council’s (Westminster) development plan.
Opposing a supermarket pure and simple was one thing; opposing one linked with such a desirable sweetener to the local council was another. The proposed site was in an area zoned for retail development, so residents’ organisations, sensing that all-out opposition was fruitless, set themselves the more reasonable task of trying to get the Sainsbury’s plan cut down to the right scale for the site.
They seemed to be on strong ground. Despite its proximity to Victoria, Pimlico is a low-rise, densely populated district, part of which is a formal conservation area. The taller buildings are no more than five or six storeys high. It conforms very well to the notion of the ‘urban village’ that today’s planners are keen to support as an antidote to the ‘Anytown, Anywhere’ big-box development that strips life and character from urban centres. The planning brief for the area was that buildings should be a maximum of six storeys. In this respect, the scale and height of the proposed development – which was to rise to eleven storeys – seemed totally out of keeping. When one sees the finished development, one local architect’s prophecy that it would be ‘like having a cross channel ferry in a yacht marina’ appears totally justified. As Moy Scott, secretary of Pimlico FREDA, the umbrella group for sixteen active residents’ associations, put it, ‘it seemed as though Sainsbury’s was bringing Victoria to Pimlico’.
The new store would mean more lorries and new car traffic too. It would receive twenty-five deliveries a day, necessitating fifty trips in and out
