Congratulations to all in Sheringham today, after Tesco finally lost an appeal to build a massive supermarket in the small Norfolk town of Sheringham.
If you’ve never visited Sheringham then perhaps you won’t understand quite what this means. You probably live somewhere where most of the small independent shops, from bakers and greengrocers to butchers and fishmongers have disappeared. You go to your local supermarket to buy all those things – perhaps out of choice, but most likely because it’s simply the only place to buy those things. And of course supermarkets sell far more than just food – books, magazines, clothes, CDs, DVDs, electrical appliances and so on.
Sheringham is a town which still retains all those small locally run indendent stores, adding to the unique charm of the seaside town. Instead of a town centre filled simply with identikit chainstores, all empty lots, it has a thriving variety of retailers selling all and sundry.
And this is more important than just a local planning concern of interest only to locals. There national interest in this outcome since big business usually wins.
Tesco’s avariciousness is unbounded, and it’s been trying to put a store in the town for years, even going so far as to put a secret deal in place with a previous local council’s administration.
But now, finally, they’ve lost their appeal, and Sheringham won’t have a superstore that would leave the town centre bare and bereft as business is lost by the rest of the town.
This is great news because large supermarket groups have much deeper pockets for legal fees that local and district councils. They simply can’t always afford to fight these battles.
Now of course Tesco can put in a new application for a different store. And they probably will – supermarkets never seem to let go. But it’ll have to be smaller, and better designed to fit in with the local town.
Read the full findings here.