store wars

We all know that the thing it represents is out of both order and any kind of sensible proportion, and yet the law of economy at all costs, or the greasy wheels of convenience still pull in so many, nagged by a vague sense of guilt or blatantly not bothered, collaborating with the ones that oil the slope to cultural and environmental stickiness. Tesco is apparently in full force and nobody knows how to stop them. Well, not quite nobody. For the last three years a protest camp has been enduring some decidedly patchy weather in objection to a package of development.

First, the local council wants to widen and straighten an old road lined with ancient woodland. Then, there is the imposition of a massive housing estate in an already overcrowded part of the country. And finally, to add a scatological level of insult to these injuries there will be a spanking new Tesco, to add to all the others in the area already. But that's OK because they'll harvest the rainwater; they do care after all. So forget the lorries thundering through the local roads as this leviathan is constructed. Forget another carpark visible from Mars. Forget the impacts on local small businesses. The council have once again caved in to the pressures of a consortium whose overbearing style and scale are so far subject to no bounds.

There may be a political solution if enough people call for changes to the planning regulations to break the cartel of the major supermarket chains, if the politicians find the backbone then to bring them in. A change like that would go a long way to restoring faith in public office. Until then it has fallen to the strange but satisfying resurgence of on site protest culture. The protestors at Titnore Woods have endured snow, the copious summer rain and every other form of adversity that goes with life on camp in order to stand up for what should be fundamental; sound decision making at a local level, a respect for the little ancient woodland we have left, the believe that local business should be supported, not undercut by effective conquest on a global scale, aided and abetted by institutional weakness or a good old fashioned sickly dose of corruption and mendacity.

So now the stage is set; the good, the true, the outraged, bluerinsed, the allegedly unwashed; all lay in wait or are more mobilised. This sleepy seaside town that once played host to Haile Sellassie after his departure from Abyssinia, that holds rumours of undergound rivers, that guards the passage to some of the finest hillforts in the south of England, this place will see a struggle that should be repeated wherever Tesco rears another head, from the villages half hidden by the beautiful flat bleakness of the Fens to the tourist-heavy beachcombed towns of Thailand. It should help us all see their encroachments for what they truly are; a blatant slap in the face of any aspiration for a better future, any aspiration that values both community and environment. Tesco should be met with outrage and defiance at every turn. We should hold responsible every politician with a hand in their steady rise. And we should raise a storm of noise that calls for the changes to our planning laws that we so clearly need.

Down the road from the camp, another hillfort stands that looks out on the coastal plain whose flat and sometimes brown ploughed fields sit golden now for harvest. In the summer they used to put on Shakespeare in a hollow just outside the ramparts. The last time I was there, I met a local woman who had just come back from Scotland and who sang in Gaellic, so it was like the boundaries of both time and distance had somehow become blurred. Once, this was the edge of town, some final breaking free of a sprawl that would already have seemed neverending if you walked it all from a centre three miles off. Now another gap is filled in the steady dot to dot that marks out this portion of the Coastal Plain, Sussex's most fertile ground; always highly populated but now half buried beneath paving slabs and tarmac, this latest stretch set to be further corrupted by an all too familiar monster.

The diggers are already moving in and the traffic from the nearby carraigeway will now be augmented by that of those funnelled to and from the extra houses, to and from the not-so-super supermarket. There is still hope, but not if we don't realise the trouble that we're in, the threat to livelihood and life itself that these wide aisled and flouro-lit hangers in a war for our custom represent. Whether or not this particular batch of new houses meets any of the standards of that much used and abused word - sustainability - whether the road in question could be managed better or just simply left alone, the imposition of another superstore renders all of this obscene and vindicates the protesters in their every effort.

Once this plain was flooded with incomers from Saxony, all in their halls and sunken sheds. Not so long back a wave of commuters made its presence felt with row after row of mock tudor semi's. They came from all over Britain and quickly settled, half detached, in their fine and semi sterile dormitories. Now the sense of community will be rendered even more tenuous, a bunch of housing so far out, so ill served by any other means of transport that cars will be all but indispensable.

But it looks as though one hall at least is going up, a mass communal roof that speaks of feasts but holds no fire or kinship. It's toll is hidden and comes with a promise of service. But if we let it make itself indispensible, if we let it ruin our local businesses as well as the fields that it sits on, not to mention the farmers it chooses to keep on the breadline for now, it will surely turn, it will crank up the prices on a population with nowhere left to go to. The signs are written in the soil that change must happen soon. For the measure of that change, for a lesson in the integrity and unblinkered clarity that can serve to see us right, look no further than the people in the woods in Worthing.

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Please sign the petition calling for a Public Inquiry into the development at Titnore:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/TitnoreWoods/