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The battle against the building of a Sainsbury’s in Pimlico, on the site of the former Wilton Road bus garage behind Victoria Station, is one of the most high profile ever fought between a local community and a supermarket chain. Behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings in this controversial case, exposed by the Sunday Times investigative Insight team, made the front page. Simon Jenkins wrote a rousing column in the Evening Standard opposing the development as an unwelcome precedent. ‘The store is big, intrusive and will offer parking, thus contriving to offend every maxim of modern planning … A superstore is a neutron bomb. It wipes out commercial life for streets around, while its parking spaces jam the traffic … Quite apart from encouraging more traffic, most of the new stores are large and ugly. That they may replace ugly gas works or goods yards is no excuse,’ he wrote. The debate continued on BBC2’s Newsnight. It was rare for a local community to make such a stand. But Sainsbury’s got its way in the end.

Local residents first got wind of the proposal in 1995. Sainsbury’s had been smart. It had got together with a housing association to put forward a mixed development for a superstore with flats built above it. Half these flats would be private, but the other half would be low-cost, affordable housing, of which there was a serious shortage in the area. This type of housing had been given the highest priority in the local council’s (Westminster) development plan.

Opposing a supermarket pure and simple was one thing; opposing one linked with such a desirable sweetener to the local council was another. The proposed site was in an area zoned for retail development, so residents’ organisations, sensing that all-out opposition was fruitless, set themselves the more reasonable task of trying to get the Sainsbury’s plan cut down to the right scale for the site.

They seemed to be on strong ground. Despite its proximity to Victoria, Pimlico is a low-rise, densely populated district, part of which is a formal conservation area. The taller buildings are no more than five or six storeys high. It conforms very well to the notion of the ‘urban village’ that today’s planners are keen to support as an antidote to the ‘Anytown, Anywhere’ big-box development that strips life and character from urban centres. The planning brief for the area was that buildings should be a maximum of six storeys. In this respect, the scale and height of the proposed development – which was to rise to eleven storeys – seemed totally out of keeping. When one sees the finished development, one local architect’s prophecy that it would be ‘like having a cross channel ferry in a yacht marina’ appears totally justified. As Moy Scott, secretary of Pimlico FREDA, the umbrella group for sixteen active residents’ associations, put it, ‘it seemed as though Sainsbury’s was bringing Victoria to Pimlico’.

The new store would mean more lorries and new car traffic too. It would receive twenty-five deliveries a day, necessitating fifty trips in and out through narrow streets more suited to small cars and bicycles. Already a badly parked delivery van was enough to cause a jam. Sainsbury’s had also admitted that it expected 90 per cent of the store’s customers to be drawn in from outside Pimlico – Victoria, Mayfair, St James, the City and Chelsea. Inevitably such shoppers would be attracted by the spacious underground car park that was to be built.

Residents were upset not only by the height and bulk of the development and the traffic implications for surrounding streets but also by the impact it would surely have on local shops. Pimlico is relatively unusual in that it has a network of small shops, only a handful of which belong to chains. These independent shops are concentrated in and around Tachbrook Street, the traditional heart of the area, home to a daily market selling fish, fruit and vegetables since 1877. Pre-Sainsbury’s, the selection of some 165 shops was one that any urban area would envy. Whether you wanted to buy a newspaper, have keys cut, find freshly ground Parmesan, pick up a bouquet of flowers, get a prescription or source the ingredients for a special meal, you could do it in a small, convenient radius.

But what would become of these shops once Sainsbury’s had opened its titan store? With a gross trading floorspace of 30,000 square feet, and eight franchise shops below, it would have more than double the sales space of all the existing shops in Pimlico. It would also be five times larger than the existing Tesco round the corner. Local residents suggested to Sainsbury’s that it cut back the size of its proposed store while retaining the same proposed number of product lines. Sainsbury’s was already well represented in the area, they pointed out. There was, and still is, a vast, fully comprehensive Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms only 1½ miles south and a smaller Sainsbury’s in Victoria Street, ten minutes’ walk away. Why, local residents wondered, did Sainsbury’s need another huge store?

Supported by local objections, Westminster Council refused Sainsbury’s planning permission in 1996 and then again in 1997, when it submitted a second proposal with the number of flats reduced from 178 to 160. Sainsbury’s appealed against these decisions and the matter went to a local inquiry. There then ensued a David and Goliath struggle.

Not content simply to rely on Westminster Council to oppose the proposal, the local community got itself organised with an experienced planning consultant to put its case. It tempered well-reasoned, carefully assembled, knowledgeable planning arguments with the genuine, heartfelt concerns of local people. Through Pimlico FREDA, the local traders of Pimlico appealed to the inspector in charge of hearing the appeal. They represented all the little shops who worked hard and stayed up late to service the community: Buckles and Brogues, Gastronomia Italia, Park Lane Cleaners, Stanwells Homecare Centre, Sea Harvest Fisheries, Market News – the list went on. Their case had a common-sense logic to it. ‘We believe that our area is unique in central London with its local market and small businesses. Many of these facilities would be unable to survive the opening of another supermarket and therefore given the government’s policy of city centre rejuvenation, we feel we should be afforded the protection of such a policy. Unless of course we are to have lifeless local communities that are cultural and environmental deserts,’ they wrote. ‘The survival of our community is at stake. We canvass your support in our endeavours against this appeal by Sainsbury’s.’

But prospects didn’t look good for the objectors. Sainsbury’s clearly had a war chest of money to pay for the costs of the appeal and could afford the best planning and legal team that money could buy. The whole affair had become political too. The outcome of such planning appeals is usually determined by the planning inspector. Pimlico objectors had been informed in writing in 1996 that this would be the case. After the general election in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Secretary of State for Environment and Transport, had rescinded this decision and decided to ‘call in’ the appeal and personally determine its outcome. Questions were asked in the House of Commons by Tim Yeo, the shadow Environment spokesman. He pressed Mr Prescott to explain why he had intervened in this particular appeal, and asserted that four months after doing so Mr Prescott had met Lord Sainsbury, a well-known donor to the Labour Party. Mr Prescott confirmed to him that the subject of ‘mixed-use housing and retail development’ was amongst the topics discussed with the Sainsbury’s chairman. He also confirmed that he had held no similar meetings with objectors to Sainsbury’s Pimlico proposal. Mr Prescott seemed to be rather keen on listening to supermarkets. His department had just approved a scheme to build a huge and controversial out-of-town superstore near Richmond in Surrey. This had been hailed by planners and developers as Labour signalling that it was relaxing the tougher planning regulations imposed by the former Conservative Environment Secretary, John Gummer. In the event, the inquiry inspector found in favour of Sainsbury’s and Mr Prescott agreed. Sainsbury’s got the planning permission it was after.

Within ten days of Sainsbury’s opening, leaflets were dropping through Pimlico residents’ letterboxes. ‘Support your local shopkeepers and stalls,’ they read. Evidently, Pimlico’s independent shopkeepers were already feeling the pinch. Three months after Sainsbury’s opening, one local shopkeeper told me that his retail sales had dropped by 18 per cent and that he was increasingly dependent on restaurant wholesale orders for the viability of his business. The ultimate irony, effectively a two-fingered gesture to community objectors, was that this was no ordinary Sainsbury’s, rather a ‘marketplace’ store, in the mould of Sainsbury’s Market at Bluebird in the King’s Road. It was to be called the ‘Market at Pimlico’. It had ten of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘specialist counters’, including a master butcher, a fishmonger, a charcuterie and a hot carvery with ‘tailor-made’ sandwiches. The message seemed to be crystal clear. Why bother with Tachbrook market or any of the existing 165 local shops when you could drive past the lot of them and shop in Sainsbury’s marketplace? Who needs a thriving independent shopping centre when you can settle for Sainsbury’s counterfeit lookalike?