Food
Food - William Skidelsky counts the cost of Sainsbury's mussels
Published 03 November 2003
Sainsbury's may offer "live" mussels and pizza ovens, but at what cost?
One of the (few) drawbacks of working at the New Statesman is that our offices are situated in a part of London, next to Victoria railway station, that is not over-endowed with places to eat lunch. Naturally, there's a collection of the usual suspects: Pret A Manger, Marks & Spencer, Starbucks. These do a decent job of churning out sandwiches and salads for the hordes of hungry office workers who throng the area each lunchtime, but their predictability makes them boring after a while. The other outlets conform to the principle that the closer to a major railway station you get, the lower the quality of the eating establishments becomes. There are numerous snack shops and cafes close to Victoria Station, all of which serve sandwiches whose fillings have a five-day-old sheen that makes it doubtful whether they are fit for human consumption.
To obtain a half-decent lunch, it is necessary to walk the five minutes or so it takes to get to Pimlico. Pimlico is something of an anomaly in central London, being simultaneously affluent and extremely deprived. One minute you find yourself walking down a street lined with Georgian stucco houses, the next you are wandering through a council estate. The food-related amenities in the area reflect this economic disparity: on the one hand there are gastro-pubs, cheese shops and delicatessens; on the other there are old-fashioned ale houses, greasy spoons and bakeries.
One of my favourite haunts is the daily market on Tachbrook Street, which has existed for more than 200 years. Though dramatically reduced since its heyday, when it occupied the whole of Tachbrook Street and part of the adjacent Warwick Way (it now comprises just a handful of stores at the upper section of Tachbrook Street), it continues to offer high-quality produce for considerably less than one would find elsewhere. For this reason, and also perhaps because it is a relic of the sort of old-fashioned street-life that is increasingly rare in central London, it continues to be popular with local residents.
Recently, however, the market's survival has been threatened by the arrival of a new competitor. Just round the corner, in a former bus depot, Sainsbury's has opened a vast monstrosity of a store, equipped with 500 underground parking spaces. This is no ordinary supermarket. Rather, it is a new concept in supermarket shopping: a "Sainsbury's market", combining even more fresh food counters of the kind typically found in department store food halls with the usual dry goods aisles. So far, the concept has been tested in just two locations (the other is on the King's Road, in west London), but if it proves popular, Sainsbury's is keen to introduce it elsewhere.
I was shown round last week by Stuart Townsend, the manager, and was forced to conclude that it is an impressive operation. Compared with most supermarkets, there is a huge amount of space. The various innovations - which include a pizza oven, the UK's first "live" mussel counter and cookery demonstrations - are well thought-out and, so far at least, competently managed. Townsend stressed that Sainsbury's has invested a huge amount in training, thus ensuring a higher standard of service than is normal in supermarkets. Certainly, the woman giving the cookery demonstrations had planned her performance well: several shoppers clustered round her counter during my visit, enjoying being shown how to cook a stuffed rack of lamb.
Still, it is hard not to question whether Pimlico really needs a store of this kind. Local residents and the council both opposed it during the planning process, and in the end Sainsbury's required an overruling by John Prescott to get the go-ahead. When I put this to Townsend, he pointed out that so far the store had proved "immensely popular": visitor numbers were high, and feedback had been "excellent". Supermarkets can always rely on this justification, but is high customer turnover the same as genuine popularity? People will always shop at such stores, simply because they are convenient. Meanwhile, the neighbourhood suffers as the market traders on Tachbrook Street are moved one step closer to going out of business.
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