Margaret Dale and Bill O’Brien do not look an awful lot like giant-killers. Polite, smiley and gently spoken, they seem more likely to offer you a cup of tea and an Eccles cake than to pick a fight with one of the country’s mightiest behemoths.
But fight they have. And so far, remarkably, they are winning. This month, following relentless campaigning by them and other doughty locals, Tesco withdrew its plans for a huge superstore just outside Holmfirth, West Yorkshire.
Unlike most local planning stories, this one has become a national talking point. This is partly because Holmfirth is the historic valley town where the BBC films the comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, but it also symbolises a wider debate about the so-called “cloning” of our landscape. Environmental campaigners believe that people are increasingly reaching a point where they are no longer willing to trade community for convenience. In years to come, say some, Holmfirth’s stand may be regarded as a beacon.
The town is a collective of stone weavers’ cottages, small shops and winding streets so steep that they make your calves ache. Coaches regularly disgorge elderly tourists who visit Sid’s Cafe or photograph themselves on the spot where Nora Batty chased Compo with her yard brush. Bill, Margaret and their group believe that a 24-hour megastore would not just weaken Holmfirth’s pulse, it would damn near finish it off. Many locals agree with that view, and some 1,189 letters of objection were lodged with Kirklees Council — an impressive tally given that the town has only 18,000 residents. And when Tesco resubmits its plans, as it intends, the campaigners will be waiting. One local greengrocer, when Tesco’s withdrawal was announced, wrote in his shop window “Holmfirth 1, Tesco 0”.
How did this mouse manage to roar so effectively? Is it and the attention it has received symptomatic of a larger, more widespread rejection of “lookalike” Britain?Bill and Margaret hope so. They believe that their campaign worked first and foremost because the campaigners “outresearched” Tesco, spending hours scrutinising, for example, 900-page traffic documents that would send most people into a coma. But second, and most importantly, they denied Tesco the chief ally on which many corporate giants depend: apathy. The majority of people assume that they cannot possibly beat multinational companies, so they don’t even try.
“There is an awful lot of apathy, isn’t there?” says Bill, who after this interview is going to a dress rehearsal for his local amateur dramatics production of Calamity Jane. “I’ve always thought that people can’t complain after the event if they had the opportunity to do something but didn’t take it.”
Margaret believes that there is an element of naivety involved, too. “People tend to believe what they are told. They don’t question it,” she says. “It’s a sense of powerlessness — ‘Tesco are massive. We can’t do anything. We won’t be heard’. There’s a degree of cynicism that it’s a done deal. This is what [big companies] rely on.”
It is hard to disagree with this point. Many years ago when I interviewed the “McLibel Two” who had dared to take on McDonald’s, they were passionate that as a society we should not be lulled into a position in which multinational companies are rarely placed under public scrutiny. Yet somehow we have allowed our high streets to morph into dreary identikits of each other, a bland retail creep of Next, Clinton Cards, Boots, WH Smith, Accessorize and the ubiquitous mobile phone shop. As many town centres testify, we have sleepwalked into a sort of monoculture.
Holmfirth, however, has not. If you discount the bank and the travel agent, it does not have any “chain” stores. Every shop, be it a greengrocer’s, clothes or toy store, is independent, quirky. The one small supermarket is an ethical Co-op. A while ago, an application by J. D. Wetherspoon to buy the Picturedrome, a cinema that is the oldest in the UK still hosting live music events, was resisted. The proposal for a branch of Tesco, to be built on the site of a former car sales garage on New Mill Road, was also fought off because it would mean that people wouldn’t bother coming to the independent shops any more because they’d have a shiny new superstore down the road. The campaigners would like Holmfirth to show the rest of the country that we don’t have to “lie down and take it”.
Mmm, but hold on. Isn’t there another way of looking at this? A Tesco store would lure thousands more people in the direction of Holmfirth. As the company argues, it would create more than 300 jobs, boosting the local economy (Tesco employs some 250,000 people nationwide). A Tesco spokesman tells me that its research shows there is a definite demand for such a store here — why would it spend the money building it if there wasn’t? As a regular customer of Tesco myself, I’m frequently grateful that the one nearest me opens all night. People do like Tesco — hence its pre-tax profits of £1.4 billion in the first half of its financial year.
Indeed, some Holmfirth residents are desperate to see it built. One comment on the campaign website reads: “Having lived here all my life, watched the mills and manufacturing disappear, the valley become a place full of people ready to object to anything and everything that would do it good, it’s sad.” Another resident, in a letter to the Huddersfield Examiner, said: “Holmfirth will be the same pretty town even with a Tesco here. It would have created more jobs for local people and also it would have been good for the elderly people in Holmfirth. I am afraid the protesters — the shopkeepers — were doing it for their own selfish reasons.”
The campaigners vehemently reject this notion. If Tesco wanted to build a smaller store within Holmfirth, they say, they would be delighted. But building it outside will leech all the life out the town itself and create traffic purgatory. Bill, who runs his own surveillance technology business in Holmfirth and says he understands that profit makes the business world go round, insists that he would love to see the site developed — just not into an all-night superstore, which is “inappropriate and totally disproportionate to need”.
“The town goes to sleep at 11pm,” says Margaret. “This is a rural area. Where are the people going to come from at 3am? We are not anti-Tesco. We’d be against any huge supermarket opening on that site.”
Research carried out by the campaign team suggested that for every job created when a large supermarket opened out of town, about 1.5 jobs were lost in the community. “What happens is that the supermarket moves in, staff migrate from the local shops, the shops fail and die and there is a loss of employment,” says Bill. Since big companies tend to centralise their services, while local shops use local accountants, plumbers, printers and electricians, there is a further knock-on effect.
During a wander around Holmfirth I must say that most people I spoke to were against the idea. But not all. One woman, who didn’t want to give her name, said: “I think it’s just the sort of boost we badly need, actually but — sshhh — don’t say I said so.” Outside Sid’s Cafe, which features a life-sized statue of Compo, Tony and Sandie Clayton are sitting at the pavement tables. One of their family members works for Tesco and finds it to be a good employer, but they don’t want the megastore here. “It would be bad for the town,” says Tony.
Tescopoly, which describes itself as an “alliance of organisations concerned with the negative impacts of supermarket power”, provides details on its website of more than 130 local campaigns against Tesco planning applications. It coaches residents on how to object to them, how to build campaigns and design posters. Tescopoly hints that, socially, the tide is turning. “Increasingly, local newspapers in particular are giving more and more coverage to local supermarket planning battles,” it says. It warns that a report by an All-Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group in 2006 predicted that independent convenience stores were unlikely to survive by 2015.
Tesco is the dominant supermarket in about 70 per cent of Britain’s 121 postcode areas. While it had 371 UK stores in 1990 and 659 in 2000, there are 2,115 today.
Shopkeepers such as the Holmfirth greengrocer Andrew Bray insist that it’s this creep of the generic that concerns them. “A lot of my business is in supplying schools and restaurants,” he says. “I’m not concerned about the impact on me but on the impact on the town generally. If little shops close then places just become a big housing estate.”
Colin Frost, 58, who runs a sight-seeing tour of the valley in an old-fashioned bus, is even more succinct. “Tesco is a good, cheap shop,” he says. “But it is trying to rule the world.”
So what is the secret to taking on such a Goliath? Tenacity? Tirelessness? Bill and Margaret answer as one: “Do your research.” Attention to detail is everything, they say. “I don’t think they anticipated how deeply we would delve into this,” says Bill. “We studied the planning application, we spent a long time drawing up a list of inaccuracies, and what we saw as omissions and distortions.”
You also need to be on your guard, they say. One of the main public consultation meetings was held in July in the school holidays, when many people were away. They believe that this was deliberate, a charge that a Tesco spokesman refutes. He said that there had been two separate public consultations months apart and that the company was very keen to hear what people think. He pointed to a Facebook group that indicated a positive reaction to the proposed Holmfirth store.
However Bill claims some people had not even heard about the first public consultation. Tesco said that it had written to 500 local households but, Bill says that he, living 200m from the site, didn’t get one. “I started to ask a few of my neighbours. We can’t find anybody who got one.”
Gaynor Brown, a member of Tescopoly, says: “You have to question every single figure. You need to gather your own information to offset theirs.” She adds that campaigners are now less likely to be deterred by verbose planning applications.“People talk about David and Goliath, but remember who won that fight,” she says.
While Tescopoly is impressed with their work, Holmfirth residents emphasise that they wanted to pitch their campaign positively not negatively — focusing on “Keeping Holmfirth Special” rather than demonising Tesco. Richard Thompson, who runs Kaye’s, an old-fashioned ironmonger that has been open and in the same family for 100 years, says: “We are not anti-progress here, really we aren’t. But part of the reason that Holmfirth is special is because the shops are all independent.”
“We don’t want to preserve the town in aspic,” says Margaret, “but we do want to keep its special character. The pace of life isn’t rushed here, you get a one-to-one service in the shops. The people have a pride in their community because it’s just a bit different to anywhere else. That’s why the BBC chose to film here 30 years ago.
“Progress isn’t a bad thing, but we are also losing a lot of things. And one of those things is the personal touch.”
Your Comments
Order By: