Mid-morning on a sunny weekday there are people on South Street but it is comfortably

Mid-morning on a sunny weekday, there are people on South Street, but it is comfortably – alarmingly – uncongested. Dewhurst the Butcher and Fludes the carpet shop are gone; three stores are soon to decamp to the by-pass; seven new shops around the nearby Kwik-Save are as empty as the day they were built. Dorchester’s main shopping street, former lodging of Judge Jeffreys and home of Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (his house is now a Barclays Bank), it is already beginning to resemble a mouth full of cavities. Now they are building the stores, people say, ‘What the hell’s that? It’s awful!’ But people won’t realise it’s their problem until South Street is damaged.”In fact, South Street is already ailing. I don’t feel people realise that, in getting a superstore, they are also losing their corner shop and their local post office.”It was all over the papers last year, there was a public enquiry, and nobody knew anything! If we’d managed to get some bums on seats at the enquiry, it might have been different But nobody thinks they can do anything. “I tried to make it clear to the public what would happen if the stores went ahead, explaining that when you move stores out of town you get fewer people coming to the centre so you haven’t got the impulse-buying which keeps shops afloat.

“The town’s shop- keepers haven’t got an argument unless their customers are against the superstores,” says Joyce Graham, who until recently, as head of the Chamber of Trade and Commerce, re- presented Dorchester’s shopkeepers and had spearheaded the campaign against the new stores. “We took the view that the new stores would not suck trade out of Dorchester. On the contrary, Dorchester was losing trade to places like Weymouth, Poole and Yeovil, where such stores, selling things like electrical goods, have already been built.”Last September, the Duchy won the appeal, and, in a gesture of rebuke, the inspectors awarded costs against the local authority – a rap across the knuckles for overruling its officers (while attempting to keep in step with the sec-retary of state). Planning consent was granted, and three multiples with shops in the heart of town – Currys, Halfords and Powerhouse – grabbed for the leases.What was surprising was how little local people seemed to care. Jimmy James blamed the refusal on vociferous vested local interests, and pointed out that the council’s local officers had strongly recommended the scheme.

And there the matter would have rested had the Duchy not appealed. “We had intended to restrict the edge-of-town retailing to food.” The committee refused permission, taking its cue from John Gummer’s recent warnings about the dangers of out-of-town stores. There was less traffic, but there were also fewer people, and the town began to wonder, as the first to let signs began appearing above whited-out shop windows, if congestion wasn’t preferable after all.The planning committee, however, remained sanguine, until another application was made in 1993 for permission to build three more huge stores on Duchy land “We got angry about this,” says John Lock. The superstore also promised to ease traffic congestion in the middle of town. Tesco came in as the highest tenderer, and sweetened the deal by promising to build a spanking new stadium for the town’s football team, the Magpies (which had previously played behind a rusty iron fence).In 1991, the superstore and stadium were duly completed, to the satisfaction of the Duchy’s architect, but the shopping centre planned for the middle of town evaporated in the recession.

“We were advised that, because Dorchester is an old town, a food-only supermarket on the edge would not affect the viability of the core.” One reason for this confidence was that a multinational, MECP, was simultaneously planning to develop a new shopping centre in the heart of the town; the two schemes seemed to balance out. “There were good planning reasons for the store,” says John Lock, head of the planning committee. The for sale and to let signs festooning the empty properties in the old centre send the same message.The story began in 1988, when West Dorset District Council received an application to build a food superstore to the south of Dorchester, just inside the new bypass Tesco was given the green light in April 1990. Looming at the edge of town, beyond cemetery and recreation ground, the super-store menaces the retailing heart of a town because it asserts a new principle of urban organisation where the car is king. In Dorchester, Tesco’s crowded, glittering car park shows that the people are voting with their wheels. What matters is no longer the ancient, rooted community but the new, mobile one; not the urban fabric but the road network. Once, a supermarket was opened in a town for the people of the town.

But, as Britain has become a country of motorway bypasses, the retailing concept has changed: now you put a superstore by a bypass in order to draw the people who live alongside it. Superstores have spread from the cities where they first appeared nearly 30 years ago into every corner of Britain But the difference now is not merely one of size. Beyond that is an apparition, a mirage, a hologram – the twin clocktowers, the cupola, the steep russet roofs, the Norman arches going nowhere, the fountains and blinding car parks of Prince Charles’s very own Tesco.If the big supermarket chains have war rooms, their wall maps of Britain must by now be covered with little flags. Beyond them, to the south, Dorchester quickly fizzles out into leafy lanes of salubrious Edwardian houses, a couple of nursing homes, the cemetery, and the recreation ground, where schoolboys play ragged games of cricket in the howling May gale. “The Walks”, the promenade that girdles the town along the banks of the mill stream and through avenues of ancient trees, follows the line of the walls that first enclosed the town in about 300ad.The 100 acres within the Walks still define the town’s heart. The Antelope shopping precinct incorporates the pub which accommodated Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes. A group of life-sized Elisabeth Frink bronzes on a street corner marks the spot where Roman Catholic martyrs were hanged, drawn and quartered in the 16th century.