Sometimes a plan is just so wrong that it has to be resisted.
Tesco want to build a rather large retail store in my very local area, implanting a supermarket that looks more than twice the size of any other building here, and shoehorning in over 200 “residential units” to boot.
It may be legal, and it may even pass some of the planning guidelines and strategies, but it’s clearly a resource grab – trying to put as many profit-generating assets as possible into a limited space.
The amount of land available is quite a large post-industrial area, but the access routes to the site are congested and overused, like arteries narrowed by the cholesterol plaque from years of chain-smoking and hamburger-eating.
The local health and education services are full to busting, and there are local anti-social behaviour problems that would only be exacerbated by increasing the local population by roughly 15%.
Tesco’s plan is an urban design for a suburban setting, and it won’t work. The store will most likely fail. The congestion and traffic will make the road system even more clogged and unsafe. Air quality will be made worse.
The local businesses will suffer from the “competition” from such a retail giant. And with a mostly ground-level car park attached to the supermarket, the policing of the area will have to be stepped up. We have to protect everyone from this.
So far, Tesco have been arguing in numbers, saying the local residents are wrong about the local traffic, the projected housing density, the potential damage to the local economy and so on.
They have not admitted that their development would increase local Carbon Dioxide emissions, and that the food they sell will become progressively more expensive as energy prices rise in future.
We have to argue back in numbers. All of you who live in the London Borough of Waltham Forest and wish to protest about Tesco muscling in to an area that needs much better choices, please come to the Waltham Forest Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday 8th September 2009 for 6.30pm before the Planning Committee meet in the Council Chamber at 7.30pm.
We will aim to fill the steps of the main Council building, and the local press will be there with cameras to record the evidence. Please wear a shirt, jumper, coat or tee-shirt with blue stripes, as we gather to “worship” the Blue Stripes of Tesco.
We don’t want to live in yet another Tesco Town !