Supermarket Stop
In Britain a new Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's or Asda opens every other day. But across the country people are battling the relentless march of the 'Big Four'. John Harris, who has taken up the fight himself, reports
Demonstrators attack a Tesco supermarket in Stokes Croft, Bristol. Photograph: Jonathan Taphouse
The first thing you notice is the towering mural. "Think local," it says. "Boycott Tesco." Then the spray-canned image of a protester, holding a placard that reads "93% of local people say no to Tesco". Down the street is a branch of Tesco Express: brand new, but all but deserted. I stand outside for 10 minutes: it's a Friday at 4pm, but no more than four people come and go. Peering inside, I see one woman buying a sandwich, two members of staff forlornly stacking shelves.
This is Stokes Croft, the gloriously bohemian corner of Bristol that has become a byword for the fight against the so-called "Big Four":Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons – and, of course, Tesco. The latter arrived here by stealth: a comedy club went into receivership, application for "change of use" was submitted by an anonymous-sounding solicitor based in Bath, and the first most locals heard was when Tesco finally revealed itself by requesting planning permission for the last few fittings.
Elisabeth Winkler. Photograph: Jon Tonks for the GuardianMy guide to the neighbourhood is Elisabeth Winkler, an activist who plays a big role in a group called No Tesco In Stokes Croft. She remembers her shock: "They applied for approval for their signs, and we were like, 'What? Tesco? Here?'"
In April, there were two riots in Stokes Croft: one in response to a police raid on a squat in search of alleged petrol bombs, which ended in the new Tesco's windows being smashed;the other in the wake of a peaceful demonstration that had been happening outside the store for a few days. During the second disturbance, Tesco was so seriously damaged it had to close for a month. In both cases, there were accusations of police brutality. Plenty of local people think they know why: as they see it, this was a show of force, intended to serve notice to the area's anti-Tesco activists that the store was here to stay.
To some campaigners, the riots were a maddening distraction that allowed the local press to present their readers with a simple choice between law-abiding Tesco or the baying mob. Others are more ambivalent. Chris Chalkley is the founder of a social enterprise-cum-lobby group called the People's Republic Of Stokes Croft, partly based around the area's huge amount of street art. An economics graduate, he is well versed in the practicalities of business, but also has an admirably romantic view of how the anti- Tesco saga fits into a larger local history.
Chris Chalkley. Photograph: Jon Tonks for the Guardian"This is one of the most bloody-minded, seditious areas of the country, and always has been," he tells me. "The Tolpuddle Martyrsdown the road, the Bristol Riots of 1831… Supermarkets are unaccountable, in the way that the rich folks in the city were when the poor had no votes. That's why this has all kicked off: simply because at no point was there the opportunity to have it out in a proper legal framework. They snuck in through the back door."
And what of the riots? "I'm with Gandhi when it comes to passive resistance," Chalkley says. "But if you want to raise the awareness of those fuckers in London, then a little bit of aggro does concentrate their minds." He pulls out a newspaper, published a few weeks after the disturbances, with a story about politicians' new-found worries about the Big Four and the demise of the high street. "All this is in the debate now, and, for me, the real prize is that we might finally get to investigate these big corporations."
I live around an hour from Bristol, in the Somerset town of Frome, a place with a population of 25,000, scores of independent shops and six supermarkets: Sainsbury's, Asda, Marks & Spencer Simply Food, Lidl, Iceland and the Co-op. We now seem to be in line for another: a 40,000 sq ft behemoth proposed by a London-based developer called St James's Investments, to be built on a largely derelict area of land that nudges the town centre. The developer will not be drawn on which supermarket chain will arrive, but it has a long history of working with Tesco.
Late last year, a handful of people – including me – decided to campaign against what seemed to be coming over the hill. At our first meeting, at which Elisabeth Winkler and I both spoke, 400 people turned up, and began to discuss an alternative to yet another big supermarket. In February, we got together in the town park and used a huge length of tape to map out how big 40,000 sq ft actually is. We don't have a name, but in the age of social media that doesn't seem to matter: the Facebook group is called No More Big Supermarkets In Frome, which surely does the job.
Our most high-profile supporter is Kevin McCloud, of Grand Designs fame, who lives a few miles outside town. We want the land in question redeveloped, and we'd be all right with a modest-sized foodstore, but we believe that a huge supermarket that also sold books, CDs, clothes, toys and all the other staples of modern big-box retailing would be very bad news indeed. Among its other wonders, our town has a brilliant record shop and book shop, a fabulous independent toy shop and a lot of locally run cafes. We'd rather it stayed like that.
Barely a week goes by without letters about all this appearing in the local paper, making the case for both sides of the argument. On occasion, the very British subtext of class rears its head. To hear some people talk – falsely, I should add - the people who are opposed to another big supermarket are haughty newcomers, whereas the town's indigenous "silent majority" will sooner or later vote with its feet. Last month, the same paper reported that our group was to be faced with its mirror image: a new organisation called Frome For All, run by a former local councillor, who says he was motivated to take action by "people approaching me and saying they wanted a town centre supermarket".
While all this has been going on, I have been introduced to a fizzing culture of protest and a ragged army of people, from anarchists to those partly worried about local house prices. What unites us is simple enough: the conviction that if we're not careful, we will sleepwalk into a future where the Big Four represent the only choice we have.
There are just over 8,000 supermarkets in the UK, and they account for97% of total grocery sales. Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons take 76% of that market. Their share of non-food retailing currently stands at 14%, a figure up by 75% since 2003. In the two years up to November 2010, planning permission was granted to 480 stores run by the Big Four, which works out at one supermarket every other day. Since 2008, they have accounted for 87% of the retail floor space given planning permission. In May, Channel 4 News reported that by 2014 retail space operated by the Big Four was set to increase by 20%: as its report put it, "an expansion drive on a scale never seen before".
One pound in every seven spent in Britain goes to Tesco alone – and the recession seems to have only boosted the Big Four. The British high street continues to decline at speed, and attention is now turning to "hermit crab" development: supermarkets taking over premises vacated by companies – Woolworth's is a good example – that have not weathered the downturn as well.
The local stories that underlie this picture of endless expansion tend to follow much the same script. Once one of the Big Four has a town in its crosshairs, it can usually be assured of eventual success. If planning permission is initially refused, supermarkets will appeal, knowing that the legal costs to any local authority will be so high it will usually rather cave in – so, though councillors often take a stand, the local officers who fret about their budgets turn out to be more pliable. Just to tilt things the supermarkets' way even further, there are Section 106 agreements,named after the relevant part of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1990, whereby big corporations can swing the debate by offering to fund no end of sweeteners: libraries, public spaces, housing, even schools.
Once planning permission has been granted and another supermarket goes up, the inevitable happens: local traders suffer, and many go out of business – whether the supermarket is out of town or, in line with modern trends, closer to the centre. I have a stack of personal testimony that makes this point, but the words I usually reach for are those of Gerard Jones, the owner of a window blinds and dry-cleaning business in Ystrad Mynach, south Wales, who has watched as Tesco has done its worst on a site 400 yards from his town centre. "Tesco have muscled in and destroyed our community as we know it," he told a local planning hearing in late 2010. "Every venture we have tried in the town centre has been shanghaied by this organisation. Footfall has fallen and nobody can truthfully say Tesco has brought shoppers into the town centre. It has taken 100 years to build our community. It doesn't take long to throw that all away."
Stokes Croft is one of two famous case studies of the fight against the big supermarkets; the other is Sheringham in Norfolk, a sleepy coastal town where the struggle between Tesco and its opponents has spread across the last 17 years.
Driving around north Norfolk – from Wells-next-the-Sea to Sheringham and then on to nearby Cromer – you quickly get a sense as to why the power of big supermarkets has only recently become an issue round these parts: it feels remote and quiet, largely devoid of the American-style retail development that so dominates swathes of the UK. When I walk around Sheringham's two main shopping streets, the impression is only heightened: there's a Sainsbury's Local but it sits among such local shops as P&J Scotter's High Class Fishmongers, The Chocolate Box sweet shop, Bertram A Watts' bookshop and a butcher called Icarus Hines. To the Big Four, this must look like the final frontier.
Outside a town centre cafe, I talk to two people who have scars from the long and ultimately unsuccessful campaign against Tesco: Eroica Mildmay, a model-turned-novelist who swears like a trooper, and Margarette Norman, a local freelance journalist. "Basically, we've got a disciplined democracy in Britain now," says Mildmay, who's not given to understatement. "That's a Burmese term. If Tesco say jump, the government says, 'How high?' They are given carte blanche to hammer the bejesus out of communities. I said, ages ago, that we'd eventually be punched unconscious, and that's what happened to us."
People in Sheringham (population: 7,000) first heard that Tesco had designs on the town in 1994. Soon enough, a group was formed under the rather clunky name Scamrod: the Sheringham Campaign Against Major Retail Over Development. Petitions did the rounds, and a banner appeared over a railway bridge: "TESCO IS A PARASITE," it said. "It fastens on to healthy, vibrant market towns and KILLS them."
The first Tesco planning application was issued in 1996, only to be withdrawn. The company then hatched a deal with high-ups from North Norfolk district council – kept "within a small circle of members and officers", according to a subsequent internal inquiry – to buy a different site, and a new planning application was made in 2003. After that, the proposal bounced between Tesco and the council for four years – until 2007, when councillors rejected the plans by 17 votes to nil, a decision upheld the following year.
This didn't seem unduly to bother Tesco: it quickly began a "public consultation", while the story took another twist. In 2009, a Sheringham-born millionaire named Clive Hay-Smith came up with plans for a "green" supermarket and food academy – which, as it turned out, was based on a partnership with Waitrose. At that point, despite Scamrod's best efforts, the debate was hacked down to a choice between Tesco and Waitrose, and the subtext of class decisively entered the debate.
Cliff Morris. Photograph: Jon Tonks for the GuardianCouncillors approved Hay-Smith's plans, and knocked back Tesco's, in March 2010 – but then things took another rum turn. Council officers refused to approve the vote, claiming they had to check its legality. Then, citing complaints against three councillors – none of which was upheld – North Norfolk district council decided to reconstitute its planning committee and hold the vote again. To no avail, the anti-Tesco campaign cried foul, claiming this move had simply upped the numbers of councillors who supported Tesco's plans. This time, the vote was tied 7-7, and a councillor named Simon Partridge put his casting vote behind Tesco.
By the time I ask Mildmay what her campaign plans to do next, we have been joined by Cliff Morris, a local newsagent. "We need to get that lot from Bristol down here," he says, grimly.
Jono Read. Photograph: Jon Tonks for the GuardianDuring the three years leading up to the final vote, the Sheringham story had often given off a questionable whiff. There were convincing claims of pro-Tesco letters from bogus addresses being sent to the local press. Mildmay and her fellow campaigners complained of online smears: she says she was regularly called a "Nazi" and a "posh bitch". As in Frome, there was talk about locals taking on supposed incomers. Even when things were kept relatively clean, there was rising tension – not least because of a spate of pro-Tesco activity, much of it orchestrated by a teenager from nearby Holt namedJono Read, who set up a Facebook page titled "We want a Tesco in Sheringham".
I meet Read in his hometown, where he's taking a break from his job at a nearby Budgens: he's a politics graduate from the University Of East Anglia hoping to get a job in social media, but for now he earns £6 an hour as shelf-stacker. A member of the Labour party who stood in last year's council elections, he obviously worked hard on his campaign. He was assisted by Tesco's national PR department, who helped him with "communication issues and organisation… they would tell us when district council meetings were coming up, and that sort of thing". When he wrote to Tesco's then-CEO, Terry Leahy, he received a reply saying, "Well done – it's people like you that have ensured that we carry on in Sheringham, because we know that support is there.'"
But does any part of him fear that once Tesco opens its doors, local businesses will close? It's an obvious enough argument: whereas supermarkets have their own suppliers and support services, independent shops use local food producers, solicitors, accountants. And when any start to suffer, you tend to get a domino effect.
"I can understand those fears," he says. "I can understand that there are places where it has gone wrong. But I also believe that Sheringham is strong enough to fight the Tesco effect. We shouldn't talk it down."
Back in Sheringham, I mention the campaign in Frome, but Mildmay is not in the mood to make me feel better. "These people will not take no for an answer," she says. Her face darkens. "We have it on good authority that since Tesco won, there's a possibility of Asda and Waitrose coming to Holt. There might be a Lidl in Cromer. People who read the trade magazines were watching us. The worry is that now we've got zapped, it'll become a free-for-all. And heaven help us."
A week later, I arrive in Dorridge, a Midlands village off the M40, with a population of just under 8,000. There are manicured lawns, polished cars and a very suburban kind of quiet. Thanks to a looming upgrade to the Chiltern main line, the trains that leave for Marylebone from the railway station will soon take only 90 minutes: property prices are inevitably very high. Dorridge is also where Justin King, the chief executive of Sainsbury's, grew up.
In among its well-heeled splendour, there is one problem: over the road from the obligatory Tesco Express is a modest-sized but pretty horrible-looking shopping centre called Forest Court, put up in the mid-1960s. It was bought by Sainsbury's in 2008 for £18m, and early last year it put in a planning application for a 25,000 sq ft supermarket. "It looked horrendous," one local tells me. "Just a normal Sainsbury's superstore: a massive orange box dropped in the middle of a residential area." Like campaigners in Frome and Sheringham, local people had big worries about impossible levels of traffic – and still do. But the company wants a big return on its investment: it continues to aim for a store that would reportedly have a turnover of £24m and serve a catchment area of 25,000 people – most of whom currently use one of at least seven supermarkets within a five-mile radius.
Thus was born Drovs, Dorridge Residents Opposed To A Village Superstore, a dozen of whose activists meet me in the big village pub to talk me through the story so far. One of their leaflets is based on drawings by an independent architect. "We have been working on an alternative plan that includes separate retail units," it says, "but with a smaller supermarket (big enough for a weekly shop) and an overall design that we think is more appropriate for the present village environment." The word they use is "modest" – though, as I point out, modern capitalism does not tend to approve of words like that.
In March 2010, Sainsbury's first proposal was rejected by Solihull metropolitan borough council's planning committee by nine votes to nil, against the advice of council officers. But having bought the shopping centre, Sainsbury's wasn't about to go away. In response, it staged events where residents were invited to spend a morning voicing their opinions, hosted by a company called Meeting Magic. According to Drovs, these were a "complete charade", where insult was added to injury by the claim that everything was about "conflict resolution".
"I said, 'What is the conflict?'" recalls Larry Sayer, a retired engineer, "and it was obvious: Dorridge residents against Sainsbury's." By way of allaying hostility, Sainsbury's also offered to fund the extension and refurbishment of the village doctors' surgery.
Its latest pitch is less brutalist, and 15% smaller, though the people I meet are still hostile, not least because of its rooftop car park. I can see their point: even under the latest proposal, the village would effectively become the soft scenery around the supermarket. "It'll become Sainsbury's on Chiltern," says Matthew Walker, a 36-year-old copywriter. "It won't be Dorridge any more."
And how has Sainsbury's been to deal with? "Patronising, I'd say," says Bryan Hunt, a construction project manager who is one of the group's planning experts. "They've gone through the motions. They'll listen where they think they can do some cosmetic massaging, but that's it. They'll get what they want."
Stokes Croft and Sheringham may have fallen. In Frome, we're in a phoney war, waiting for a planning application that could arrive tomorrow, or in five years' time. But in Dorridge, everything is a matter of high stakes and great urgency. Sainsbury's latest planning application will be heard in October; in the meantime, Drovs has to persuade councillors the plan is still far too big.
In the centre of the village, I meet someone who is a little less concerned. Tony Craig owns Dorridge Butchers, once based in the old shopping centre, now relocated with Sainsbury's help. "The village needs this," he says. Does he not fear losing business? He is, after all, a species endangered by the Big Four's seemingly unstoppable rise. "I'm an independent butcher," he assures me. "We hold our own. We've got that independent touch. And anyway, Sainsbury's will bring more footfall. I'll pick up a few of those people as well."
Not for the first time, I'm reminded of the Turkish proverb: "When the axe came into the woods, the trees all said, 'Well, at least the handle is one of us.'"
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