Micro-Theory 2: Tesco Spires

You’re driving along a busy dual carriageway. All you can see to either side are dusty trees and high palisades of fencing. Then, just for a moment, you see the shape of a church spire appear and disappear between the trees. And somehow you’re reassured by that – even though you’ll never know the name of the church or go inside it. You’re reassured, perhaps, by the thought that there’s still a rural England out there, a land of quiet spinneys and village greens, the town hall and the war memorial, Easter Egg hunts and home-made jams – and so forth. The only problem is that what you saw wasn’t a church: it was a Tesco Superstore, an out-of-town retail outlet with the same vast acreage and strip-lit aisles as Asda or Sainsbury’s. The difference with Tesco is that they plonk a super-structure on top of their store which is a sort of bastard amalgamation of clock tower, church spire and oast house, complete with picturesque weather-vane. Tesco is, I believe, the only supermarket which seeks to appropriate the traditional iconography of the village green in this way. And while Tesco is certainly not the only greedy supermarket out there, it is, as far as I know, the only supermarket which seeks to disguise the familiar process of draining money away from the town centre by subliminally evoking our collective memory of the same world which they’re helping to destroy, and supplanting themselves there as an empty, trashy surrogate.