Published Date: 01 September 2010
By JANE BRADLEY, The Scotsman.com
Supermarket giant Tesco has been forced to admit it used a local property company as cover to buy a shopping centre that was then allowed to fall into near dereliction to make way for a "Tesco Town" development.
These are excerpts - see full article [here].
Supermarket giant Tesco has been forced to admit it used a local property company as cover to buy a shopping centre that was then allowed to fall into near dereliction to make way for a "Tesco Town" development.
These are excerpts - see full article [here].
Typical Tesco tactics ,lets hope that Tenbury wont go this way .What we need is something that will draw tourist into the town .What about sports hall ,bowling alley ,ice skating .
ReplyDeleteAnd people want tesco in Tenbury. They should read this and think again. Do they want Tenbury going down the toilet.
ReplyDeleteAgree, the idea that many people will want to leave their newly-purchased Tesco shopping [inc. chilled and frozen goods] in their cars in the sun and then wander off into Tenbury for an hour is highly unlikely/bonkers. You're just going to want to get the stuff back home to fridge/freezer/cupboard in case it should spoil. The "it'll bring more people to town" argument means one thing only realistically - more traffic clogging-up the Teme bridge - certainly not more people shopping in the main street + spending money in local businesses.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the best defences against a Tesco store in the Tenbury Wells "car park" location are:
ReplyDelete1. Present the planning authorities with a portfolio of what happened to the high street of other small towns when a supermarket giant moved into the area. If they go ahead and give planning permission, then they would be directly, if not personally, responsible for not heeding the warnings. Could they/should they live with that?
2. Data on how many extra vehicles per hour will visit the store (shoppers and suppliers), trying to enter through a narrow entry/exit point onto the main high street, and how many of these will need to cross the already congested bridge. Maybe 500 visitors per hour at peak times coming across the bridge = 1000 bridge crossings (there and back)? That's an extra 16 or 17 vehicles per minute on the bridge.... Even half that will create congestion, not only on the bridge but also when trying to exit from the bridge onto the main road (which is often already congested).
3. If Tesco fail to get planning permission for the "car park" site and focus their attention on an outside town site, such as Burford, near the recently-built housing estate, for example, and they managed to get planning permission, the precedent could enable development of a clone-city of megastores by the main road, which would greatly damage Tenbury's shops and high street.
4. Have an alternative plan of action for use of the site. A market of some sort, maybe.