Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (23 page)

By the mid 1950s, the daily food shop was a distant memory for most Americans. Postwar affluence and unlimited space had combined to create a new suburban landscape in which middle-class wage-earners and their baby-boom families lived out the American dream. Throughout the fifties, a million new ‘Homes for Heroes’ were built each year, most of them on plots large enough to require no boundary fences and with plenty of parking space for the essential family fleet of cars. The low-density lifestyle suited supermarkets perfectly. From now on, no suburban neighbourhood would be without one; no American home complete without its automobiles and ‘ice-box’. In the four years after the war, Americans bought 21 million of the former and 20 million of the latter, and while they certainly appreciated their fridges, they positively adored their cars. People shopped in them, ate in them, watched movies in them, made love in them. Even to die spectacularly in them, as James Dean did, was seen as somehow glamorous.

Quite what all this driving around meant for cities was an open question – and it took a European to see that what it demanded was a whole new urban typology. That man was Victor Gruen, a ‘short, stout and unstoppable’ Viennese architect, who escaped to America just before the Second World War with, in his own words, ‘an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English’.
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Gruen was soon making a name for himself designing eye-catching shop-fronts for fashionable New York boutiques, but his ambitions demanded a bigger stage, and when the department store Daytons approached him to design a new shopping complex in Minnesota, his chance came. Gruen seized the opportunity to address something he felt to be lacking in his adopted
country. It was clear to him that old ‘downtowns’ were dying, and that nothing much was coming in to replace them. American-style suburbia, he felt, had none of the ‘heart, brain and soul’ of traditional European cities.
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He decided it was time to give it some: to create a new kind of city centre for the motor age.

Southdale Shopping Centre, completed in 1956, was the result. The world’s first enclosed shopping mall, its basic idea was simple: take the European high street, and recreate it, under controlled conditions, indoors. It was a brilliant commercial response to Americans’ increasing reluctance to get out of their cars. A vast, introverted, featureless box built in the middle of nowhere, the mall contained enough goodies on the inside – tropical birdcages, luscious planting, fountains and piped music – to become a ‘destination’ in its own right; a fantasy world where people went for a special treat, just as they had gone to department stores in the nineteenth century. Shoppers happily drove there without noticing that once inside, they were actually required to walk. With the benefit of air-conditioning, the extremes of Minnesotan weather – typically a choice between blast furnace or blizzard, depending on the season – were effectively neutralised, creating a ‘year-round climate of eternal spring’, which, according to Gruen, lulled people into walking ten times further than they would have done in a crowded, rainy street.
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In fact, people behaved much as they might have done on a lovely spring day on a traditional high street, spending several hours browsing the shops, stopping for a bite to eat, and then shopping some more. ‘The shopping centre consciously pampers the shopper,’ explained Gruen, ‘who reacts gratefully by arriving from longer distances, visiting the centre more frequently, staying longer, and in consequence contributing to higher sales figures.’
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Southdale opened to euphoric popular acclaim, and shopping would never be the same again.

Within a few years, malls were being built all over America, many of them designed by Gruen himself (and built, as we saw earlier, by Jim Rouse). The malls’ effect on nearby city centres was immediate and striking: they sucked all the commercial life straight out of them. Gruen knew this perfectly well, but, urbanite though he professed to be, his view of ‘downtowns’ was remarkably unsentimental: he believed they were past saving. Malls might spell the death-knell of American cities, but in their place would rise up newer, better ones, designed by – Victor Gruen. For Gruen, malls
were
cities, creating a new urban order that would provide everything that traditional cities had done, only better. He predicted that malls would become ‘not only a meeting ground but also, in evening hours, the place for the most important urban events’.
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His words have turned out to be horribly prophetic. With Southdale, Gruen created a blueprint whose power turned out to be more potent than even he could have imagined. Like some Tolkienesque ring in the wrong hands, its influence has spread all over the world, destroying the cherished city centres that were once its inspiration.

By the early 1950s, America was in love with supermarkets, and Britain was in love with America. Despite the lack of space and even greater lack of fridges (fewer than 8 per cent of British households had one in 1950), the American suburban lifestyle was irresistible to postwar Britain.
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Suburbia, after all, was a British invention; now Britons yearned for the latest American version, with its forecourts, drive-ins and malls.

Supermarkets had been around in Britain since the 1920s – high-street branches of Tesco and Sainsbury slotted in between the butchers, bakers and the rest. But it was American-style superstores that the British now hankered after, and as soon as levels of car and fridge ownership rose high enough to make ‘one-stop’ shopping possible, Britons took to them like eager ducks to water. Superstore development in Britain, as we saw earlier, went virtually unregulated during the 1970s and 80s, the first hint of planning restraint coming in 1988, with the guidance note PPG6 requiring local authorities to ‘take into account’ the effect of new superstores on local town centres before reaching their planning decisions. To judge from the rate at which superstores carried on getting approval (the number more than doubled over the next 10 years), most authorities thought their effect was entirely beneficial. But research published by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in 1994 suggested otherwise. It found that only 3 per
cent of traditional market towns considered themselves ‘vibrant’, and as many as 15 per cent were in decline.
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Things developed very differently in mainland Europe, where laws were put in place to protect traditional town centres as soon as the threat from supermarkets became clear. An Italian law of 1971 required special permits for shops larger than 1,500 square metres, favouring local shopkeepers who wanted to enlarge their stores over any proposals for new development.
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The French
Loi Royer
of 1973 required local government approval for stores larger than 1,000 square metres, and that of central government for stores larger than 10,000. Although plenty of hypermarkets were built in France, at first they sold mainly non-food items, leaving traditional shopping streets intact. In West Germany, where postwar reconstruction focused on rebuilding town centres destroyed by bombing (even to the extent of faithfully recreating market squares from old photographs), the last thing the government wanted was for those centres to lose their trade. A law was passed in 1980 restricting the size of suburban retail units to 1,500 square metres.
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Britain had to wait until 1996 for any planning legislation with real teeth: a revision to PPG6 requiring local authorities to adopt a ‘sequential approach’ when selecting sites for new superstores. Town-centre and city-edge sites had to be considered first, and only if these were unsuitable would out-of-town sites be permitted. The so-called ‘Gummer effect’ (after the Tory minister John Gummer, who introduced the legislation) was to cause an immediate, if undramatic, slowing down of superstore development. But the new law had other effects too. Deprived of their favourite greenfield sites, supermarkets became inventive about other ways to expand. Their move into the convenience sector dates from this period, but small-scale shopping was never what supermarkets were about. What they really wanted was to build big again. As Joanna Blythman described in her book
Shopped
, ‘space-sweating’ was the solution they came up with: ways of increasing the size of existing stores, either by building extensions in car parks, or constructing internal mezzanines that, thanks to a loophole in PPG6, required no planning permission.
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In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart used such a move to add a cool 3,300 square metres to its Sheffield store (more than twice the size of an average ‘one-stop’ supermarket), announcing
plans to add mezzanines to a further 40 stores. But space-sweating, although useful in the short term, was never going to satisfy the supermarkets. Even as the government moved to close the planning loophole, they had found a much better way to get around the planning system: buying land.

By 2005, the ‘Big Four’ had acquired a land bank of 302 undeveloped sites between them, with options on a further 149 should planning permission become available.
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Tesco had by far the largest share, with 185 sites and enough land to increase its market share from 30 to 45 per cent should it all be developed.
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A 2006 report by Friends of the Earth,
Calling the Shots
, described how supermarkets were using their land to hold local authorities to ransom. Tactics included leaving key sites vacant while lobbying councils to change their minds over permission, putting restrictive covenants on sites to prevent rivals from developing them, and offering councils sweeteners in the form of Section 106 agreements – legal bribes otherwise known as ‘planning gain’ – that might involve anything from providing some additional landscaping to building community facilities or affordable housing. The report listed more than 200 recent planning applications that had gone the supermarkets’ way due to such tactics; among them a Tesco development in Streatham whose ‘inadequate design quality’ had apparently become ‘adequate’ once the supermarket agreed to build some local leisure facilities, and another in Coventry for a 13,000-square-metre superstore (the largest in Britain) granted on the basis of a new football stadium being thrown into the deal.
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Joanna Blythman quoted one Tesco spokesperson who summed up the rules of the grocery space race thus: ‘Sometimes the value of the land is enough to push the deal; sometimes you have to build the stadium.’
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With the connivance of local authorities, supermarkets in Britain are now full-blown urban developers. In 2004, Asda Wal-Mart completed a new 5,400-square-metre superstore in Poole, Dorset, part of a £30 million development that included 96 waterside apartments, 64 non-waterside (i.e. affordable) ones, a 600-space car park, offices, a shopping arcade and a public green space. Spot the planning gain. The scheme featured prominently on the council’s website as a key part of its urban regeneration strategy. Poole is far from unique: building chunks of city
is now a favourite gambit of supermarkets. With enough ‘planning gain’ in the mix, not only can they build new superstores more or less wherever they like, but they create ready-made captive markets to go with them; all in the name of ‘urban regeneration’. As Tesco’s corporate affairs manager put it in 2005, ‘We’re now thinking a lot more like a developer and not just like a retailer.’
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In 2005, Tesco turned its rivals green when it announced plans for a £100 million ‘sustainable community’ in Tolworth, south-west London. The scheme, described by its architects Building Design Partnership (BDP) as a ‘vibrant mixed use development suited to the 21st century’, included a new 5,500-square-metre superstore, 835 flats, 700 square metres of other retail and community facilities, new public open spaces, and a ‘green bridge’ over the A3 linking the site to the existing town centre. The scheme’s ‘sustainable’ label derived from a raft of ‘green’ measures including solar panels, a combined heat and power (CHP) system run on bio-gas, and rainwater recycling. The architects described the scheme on their website:

The development is being led by a strong sustainability agenda, and proposes to exploit the synergy between a Tesco store and residential apartments above which has the potential to make Tolworth an exemplary sustainability project that will be a benchmark for future developments in the UK, Europe and the world.
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