Last summer, a new Tesco Express opened on the site of a former pub in my home town of Horsham.
For a sleepy market town, it was big news that sparked a campaign against the move in the months before Tesco opened for business, even though the site had been empty for some time.
Pubs morphing into c-stores has become a common sight across the UK as the mults look to capitalise on shoppers choosing to shop little and often. A quick Google search shows there’s plenty in the pipeline, and even a couple of campaign groups battling to stop them opening.
This is because pubs make ideal sites for c-stores – they often don’t need planning permission to be converted, have good car parking facilities and are in the right locations.
The latest big-name retailer to take advantage is The Co-operative Group. Yesterday morning it revealed it had signed an agreement to lease 54 pub sites from NewRiver Retail, which snapped up 202 pubs from Marston’s last year.
But instead of taking over the pubs, The Co-op’s plans are a little different. It says that on the “majority” of the sites, it will build a new food store using the “surplus land adjacent to the existing public houses” like car parks and gardens so the pub and new c-store trade in tandem. It claims only a “smaller number” will be converted to standalone c-stores.
Even though the majority of the pubs will continue to trade, The Co-op’s move is bound to leave pressure groups aggrieved. Last month, Camra revealed the rate of pub closures had increased from 26 to 28 a week between April and December 2013.
But deals like this are beneficial to the community. Not only do they create much-needed jobs, they provide services to local communities, and in the case of The Co-op, those communities will get two for the price of one – a pub and a local shop.
Surely it’s better to have a shiny new c-store making use of the site than an empty, neglected building?
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