Tesco in Lyme Regis?

Tesco in Lyme?
Expressing any opinion about this in Lyme right now is tantamount to suicide. Feelings on the question of the impending arrival of the retail giant are running very high. I don’t think that even the two years upheaval of our seafront caused this much controversy, to the point where it’s the only talking point wherever you go.
But opinions vary, depending on which cross section of Lyme society you’re talking to. When we made our video last week, we interviewed local traders, mostly shops close to the epicentre, but we’ve already been asked if we might ‘redress the balance’ by pointing the camera at shoppers.
At the Lyme Traders Association meeting tonight, you could have cut the air with a Tesco plastic bag. The accent of the discussion was about what happens when a giant like Tesco drops onto a small town. Local Traders suggest that Tesco will kill all the shops, invite other ‘big name’ competitors into Lyme, change the face of Lyme forever, etc, etc. Colin Willis chaired the meeting as best he could amongst a plethora of actions and ideas, almost begging them to calm down and look seriously at the options available, announcing the alternative consequences of a large retail area being empty, like the Three Cups. Meanwhile, propositions of campaigns being announced, sticking up posters, canvassing the town, hate Tesco till they go away, organising meetings, canvassing the populace, demonstrating outside the store, boycotting, with the main theme of Stop Tesco Coming to Lyme, and personally I think its all rhetoric.

No doubt at all that it’s a thorny subject. We all feel for those who might lose their jobs, or lose their livelihood, but these are changing times, and as Marcus Dixon so subtly put it, the way people shop is changing, more shopping is done on the internet, the real question arises within the community, and it’s uncertain as yet that the community of Lyme Regis don’t want Tesco. There is also the view that the biggest loss to the town is Woolworths, or that Woolworths merely decimates a different area of local business than Tesco. In the main, Tesco hits the food shops. Pip Evans commented that having visited a nearby Tesco Express, he found no fresh fish on sale, a remark directed, not too subtly, at Simon Bennett, local wet fish man, who with Franny Owen, is the loudest and most outspoken. In fact, the meeting wasn’t well supported by traders, might seem clear that those shops whose trade is unlikely to suffer, didn’t attend. I can hear already the cry of the few that Tesco will damage everyone, damage the town permanently, destroy Lyme’s retail individuality, but, is that really true? It represents a flawed belief that visitors only come here for the shops. It isn’t true! None of us, visitors or residents, are here because the shops are great. In fact, most of us are complaining that we can’t get our staple foods in Lyme. In the Summer the tourists empty the Co-op while residents are at work, and other food shops are either too expensive, or too specialist for daily needs. From that point of view, if Tesco is going to fill that need, I’m all for it. Also, I don’t have a motor car, and I can avoid a twice weekly trip to either Axminster or Bridport. A lot of elderly residents are in a similar situation, having to make a 14 mile round trek to do a little shopping.

The reason people come here, (and including via ancestry, those born here), visit this place, open businesses here, live here, paint pictures, make movies and write books here......, has a lot to do with that big blue thing that borders the southern edge of the town.