The campaing against the planned Tesco expansion

So we and some others in the town started Big Enough Already - the campaign to stop the expansion of Tesco in Wolverton.

Wolverton is an old Victorian town in the north west of Milton Keynes. It mainly consists of worker cottages built by the railway works (Wolverton was a major and prestigious railway building town). The houses are mainly terraces with narrow streets etc.

Tesco wants to expand their store in this town, making it more than twice as big. This will require demolishing the current store and building a new one on stilts. They have a store of the same format in the south east of Milton Keynes, Kingston, which is surrounded by dual carriageways (grid roads, for those of you who know Milton Keynes). The Kingston complex is large and always busy even though it is surrounded by grid roads.

We thought that the intention to build a similar sized store in a small market town with Victorian infrastructure was ridiculous.

We (the Big Enough Already team - 5 of us: me, my boyfriend Geoff a local business owner and 3 other residents) set to work on a campaign to get people to raise objections to the expansion. We designed, printed and delivered a leaflet detailing the planned store size and the impact we saw that it would have, on it we provided the contact details of the government officials to write to.

We attended the public consultation meetings and handed out these leaflets - we produced and delivered 2 leaflets, one before and at each public consultation meeting. A member of the group spoke at the meetings, putting forward our views and position on the proposed expansion.

This took place over the course of a few months and we then got to the position of Tesco submitting the traffic and retail impact assessment reports that their consultants had prepared.

The Council's consultants reviewed them and said - not enough info and sent them back.

That's where things got up to.