At home with the supermarket

There is a new force in town shaping and re-defining our towns and cities, but supermarket-led developments don’t have to be a nightmare, according to a new report by CABE – with some well-thought design they can leave a lasting legacy for the better. Mark Cantrell reports

The prevalence of the term “Tesco-town” is telling of the burgeoning impact that the big supermarkets are gaining when it comes to shaping our towns and communities – and it’s fair to say that not everyone is happy about it.

Okay, so it might be a tad unfair on Tesco to have its name requisitioned, and therefore be singled out for popular discontent over the issue, but under whatever name it is called, this isn’t the first time that economic ‘big hitters’ have shaped our urban spaces. Indeed, compared to the earliest waves of business-led urbanisation, one might call the retail-led transformation of our civic space rather sedate, pedestrian even, compared to those earlier pioneers of the urban experience – in all its splendour and all its horrors.

This was the era when urbanisation exploded into a stygian life. There was no planning; just the blank canvas of opportunity and little thought for the consequences for those caught in the maw of modernisation.

Existing towns and cities bloated as their populations soared, the new inhabitants packed into new homes, new districts, the infamous slums of the age, whilst in many cases once insignificant villages were transformed into ‘dark satanic’ metropolises practically overnight.

Later, often in reaction to the dire conditions rapid industrialisation had brought forth, the great philanthropists of the late Victorian age and onwards – Salt, Cadbury for example – created entire neighbourhoods, or even towns, to house their workers in more humane conditions. They were, in effect, paving the way for future laws and codes that sought to impose some order and humanity on urban growth. And so the world turned.

For all the changes that have come about in the modern age, say the past 40 years or so and accelerating in the last decade, the urban landscape has remained very much defined by the industrial revolution and the larger than life figures who drove it. This is changing, of course, as industry has receded, but it is surely a curious coincidence that the supermarket retailer we know today has emerged over these four decades of post-industrialisation. Little wonder, then, that the ‘superintendents of retail’ have stepped up to fill the spaces left vacant by the ‘captains of industry’.

Consciously or not, the big supermarket retailers are following in the footsteps of the industrialists who forged the towns and cities we live in today, setting the tone and the character for the urban spaces we will inhabit tomorrow.

The days when a business baron could create an entire urban space to keep his workforce close at hand – and inevitably under firm control – are long gone. One would hope. After all, nowadays, there is a host of planning laws, building codes and design standards, expected or – to varying degrees – demanded to limit or otherwise restrain the kind of rapacious urbanisation of those heady days of industry.

There is also many a stakeholder to consider when creating modern urbanised settlements; factors those bearded patriarchs of the industrial age never faced. So, as the big supermarkets pick up the baton of place-making, we will probably never see the foundation of a true ‘Tesco-town’: one built to order around the supermarket with a ready-made consumer-base shipped in, accommodated (in every sense of the word), and beholden to the local superstore chief.

Still, increasing numbers of retail developments feature homes and other community facilities; features that may well prompt the dystopian-visioned cynic to suggest it’s early days yet, but that’s another story. Regardless of the debates and controversies that surround big retail developments, whether they features homes or not, such schemes are very much here to stay.

Like their industrial predecessors, there is no inherent reason why the impact of retail-led regeneration development schemes should have a negative impact on our towns and cities and neighbourhoods. Quite the contrary, the best designs can have a positive impact and leave a lasting legacy every bit as strong as the best of urban architecture bequeathed to us from ages past.

The trouble is, as a new report by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) says, the examples of good well-thought out designs are outweighed by examples of ill-thought proposals that have taken little or no consideration of the particular requirements of the site they are looking to develop. According to the report, ‘Supermarket-led development: asset or liability’, poor design of supermarket-led developments risks them becoming a liability to town centres rather than an asset.

“Supermarket-led development can bring valuable jobs and investment to an area,” said a CABE spokesperson. “But many schemes are simply repeating old out-of-town proposals – typically big plain buildings in a large car park – which are unsuitable for town centres. [The report] warns that short-term economic gain will not compensate for the loss of local character.”

New stores, built as an integral part of a mixed use development – increasingly featuring housing as part of the package – are creating large parts of our towns and cities and so they have a tremendous impact for better or worse not only on urban spaces but on the people who call them home. It also potentially impacts the reputation and subsequently the business of the retailers themselves – so getting the balance of purpose and the design is absolutely crucial.

This is becoming all the more so as the Government prepares to launch its localism bill that is credited as giving greater freedoms and powers to local authorities and communities – significant given the historic opposition big supermarket developments frequently provoke.

“With local people given real power to decide what gets built and where, it will be even more in the interests of supermarkets to propose good schemes which benefit the area,” said Richard Simmons, the organisation’s chief executive.

In preparing the report, CABE reviewed 30 major schemes from around the country by retailers such as Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s. As well as assessing the design-merits of the scheme, the report also seeks to provide technical advice to planners and councillors on how to work with supermarkets to make the best of each investment, to create schemes that are commercially viable but also enhance the place where they are built.

“Supermarkets are increasingly involved in creating large parts of our towns and cities. Fewer stores are built to stand alone: often they come with a mix of housing, sports facilities, shopping streets or schools,” says the report.

“For all their commercial success, supermarkets have to deal with powerful neighbourhood opposition. There have been hundreds of local campaigns in the UK against applications to open them, often related to their environmental and purchasing practice. Research has shown that 50 per cent of people think that the size and strength of supermarkets should be controlled to stop them putting local independent retailers out of business.”

CABE has used the report to highlight some good examples of design, such as the Grand Union Walk housing in a Sainsbury’s development in Camden, London, built in 1988 and which the organisation says still stands as a good example for contemporary developers to draw upon. Then there is a Tesco store in Ludlow which CABE cites as a further example of the best of what can be achieved. On this site, the store’s roof profile echoes the contours of the hills which form the town’s backdrop – a far cry from the blocky and inelegant lines that features the typical ‘big box’ retail development.

A more current Sainsbury’s development in Fulham, West London, was also praised by CABE as a scheme that should become an asset to the area. It is described as pedestrian friendly, bringing new streets and landscaping to the neighbourhood, while the store itself has been designed so as to avoid dominating the street scene.

On the other side of the coin, Tesco’s Bromley by Bow development gained CABE’s thumbs down for giving precedence to the store itself at the expanse of the local area – and by extension the sensibilities of the locals – while the housing associated with the development was placed by the A12 where noise, air quality and outlook are at their worst. This isn’t the only scheme CABE has reviewed where housing quality has been ill-considered: some developments propose access to apartments from a basement car park, it said, while others have apartments with balconies that overlook delivery yards. Not exactly des res, then.

If bold and brash was the form for the out of town function of a store development, the message for mixed use schemes and town-centre developments is clearly one of subtlety and composure that fits the scene. For retailers, there is clearly a culture-shift required, no less than for everyone else facing the prospect of becoming accustomed to retailers shaping the places where we live. The demand for local identity does rather fly in the face of the kind of brand and design conformity that has historically been the essential ethos of the retail sector for decades. In effect, mass market retailing has to steer itself away from its tried and tested approach that has fed into the popular disparaging ‘clone town’ remark.

“[I]n most of the schemes CABE sees, it is clear that the basic model for a supermarket out-of-town brownfield site has simply been transported to a town centre setting. This is not an oversight,” the report said. “The standard supermarket shell is the product of the intensive refinement of a tried and tested commercial model. The retailers and their developers tell us that this model still serves them very well in a highly competitive commercial world.

“This creates a number of problems. Out-of-town sites are usually very straightforward to develop, but urban centre sites almost never are. There is also a far greater complexity to supermarket-led development itself now that it locks together building uses with very different cycles of renewal. The life of housing, for instance, is not the same as the life of retail space.”

Consumption patterns are also changing, the report points out, as the internet cuts a swathe through old-established shopping patterns. With ever-more people expected to do their shopping online as the years pass, CABE suggests it demands a greater degree of flexibility in design to meet future business and community needs.

These are doubtless commercial considerations that retailers are already grappling with – it’s their futures after all – but as CABE points out, such shifting shopping trends as people gravitate online are likely to affect the conventional lifespans of retail buildings.

For now, that CABE has identified instance of good design for supermarket-led mixed use developments surely shows that the sector is quite capable of delivering modifications to its tried-and-tested models, but it also indicates that the retail sector faces some culture shifts of its own, if it is to transplant its winning model in a different environment in a way that works for everyone.