This story may well shock you as much as it shocked me. I had always assumed it was the stuff of sci-fi, an Orwellian nightmare but ‘Tesco-towns’ are apparently on their way. It is a concept that will take some selling; perhaps a catchy jingle (‘aisle be there for you’) or whizzy gadgetry with one’s Clubcard able to open the door to your flat but, however it is packaged up, barcoded and rammed into our communities, I like to think there will be protests to be had.

I make no secret of nor apology for my deep distaste for Tesco despite ceding that I probably go a bit overboard, and also fully accept that free markets and a Capitalist system will inevitably lead to the biggest companies with the strongest financial muscle being able to boss their particular markets. One of the main problems, though, is that Tesco seems unable to stay within its traditional marketplace. World domination beckons and, to that unblinking end, every little extra product helps. After all, with Tesco you can bank, post, get a new phone, buy your clothes, get a credit card, process photos, take out a Tesco mortgage (to pay for your Tesco home), take out a loan for a car, get car insurance and fill it up with Tesco petrol and so much more, all for cheaper than most other competitors thanks to the organisation’s crushing economies of scale.

Many take a fairly laissez-faire approach to this state of affairs, which is their right of course, but it’s important to remember that it’s our country and it’s not a case of anything goes for towns, villages and communities the country over.

It is this people power that I hope will prevent too many Tesco-villes from sprouting up. Well, that and a decent solution to the housing shortages we face either side of the border.

These mini-villages of apartments, schools and parks ‘shackled’ to the depressingly homogenous Tesco stores that are being planned across the UK come at the worst time. With the shortage of housing blighting the country at the moment, many families will have little choice but to have large supermarkets as their nearest neighbour and noisy delivery lorries as their early morning wake-up call. The Good Life it ain’t. What would Wurzel Gummidge say?

This is a map of Tesco stores in London from 2008:

It is a busy smattering of outlets that could be replicated up and down the UK and, right now, there are 21 protests against new Tesco stores in Scotland alone. The marvellous Tescopoly website can provide more detail if desired.

There are some lovely villages, inside and outside of big cities, that make do just fine without large supermarkets hoovering up the trade in everything from televisions to microwaves and from fast-food dinners to booze. These need to be the template for future plans going forward – vibrant high streets with a pulse, a life, a character that Tesco from Cheshunt cannot provide.

And here is where my protest falls down and, to add insult to injury, David Cameron’s rhetoric makes sense. No-one is forcing people to go into Tesco stores. Its popularity is not due to some odious conspiracy that I would like to think exists, but because the supermarket chain is, well, popular. I could make the point that that popularity is artificial because we all work such long hours that we have little choice come 7:30pm/8pm but to go to the only place that is open to buy our dinner and I could also claim that it is the biggest superstores that will go on getting bigger because they can keep prices lower than the fledgling competition out there but, hey, that’s capitalism for you. I’d shop at a Butchers, Bakers and even a Candlestickmakers if they stayed open past 5pm but they don’t so it is to the big superstores that I go.

David Cameron has called continuously for entrepreneurs and while most, myself included, would immediately think of manufacturing or technology with such a call, perhaps it is the more bread and butter areas of simply getting your daily shopping in where we need to think afresh. Can I complain about Tesco if I’ve not bothered my behind to help chip away at its dominant market share? Well, obviously I can (witness the above) but that’s the easy way out.

We do live in a free world and I fully accept that large megastores are an unavoidable byproduct of that appropriate way of life but my concern is that, with strong, vibrant communities largely a thing of the past and many micro-populations unable or uninterested in joining together and deciding how they want their high street to be, either through purchase power or planning processes, then many of us will be worse off.

Tesco-towns, if they do bring their American-style presence to the UK, could be described as many things but I suspect ‘idyllic’ won’t be one of the applicable adjectives. This is a shame but it is up to us, the meatballs are in our court.