I like Hadleigh: a success as a town and a high street with timber framed wool merchants’ houses painted that satisfying lime wash matt ochre. People live on the shopping street. The big ring road is working. It takes traffic out and around and away into the country. I felt almost ashamed to be driving in there at all last Wednesday. There were people walking about in the middle of the road, crossing from the butchers to the grocers and the wine shop and the newsagent. The Deanery where the Oxford movement was born, the medieval Guildhall and the church all fall off to the flat area to the south, which backs onto the river. Jonathan and Carol had asked me to join them in resisting Tesco who wanted to get into the old fulling works and build a handy superstore there.

I always feel it’s a difficult thing to come in and pronounce like this. I’m just a television person. I try to get to see what is going on. It seems much too easy to simply reply to the letter in a supportive way and assume that everything is black and white. I can’t start ranting from miles away. I need to get close up and rant in situ. And, anyway, I have worked for Tesco. Yes, I was even the original “every little helps”. Everybody is very keen to point this out. I get letters from enraged people who assume that I am in league with the devil. Bugger them. I last advertised Tesco car insurance about a year ago; my voice only, doing  a job, actually. Just like huge portions of the population I shop at Tesco. I don’t mind Tesco being a success and taking over the world if it wants to, but if it does so then it has to be a good ruler. Like most issues in town planning this is not black and white its grey and beige; or Suffolk pink in this case, because they’ve redesigned their store to try and camouflage it. But I like cheap convenient shopping done well, in the right place. We all do.

Carol was there with some of her council to show me that the water meadows of Hadleigh were quite the wrong place. Why? Because although it is round the back, as it were, the expected trade is huge.  In order to service this facility hundreds of cars will have to drive through the middle of this narrow-laned gem. They will have to cross a narrow medieval bridge. They will clog up the town. They will occupy more than the site allocated because they need a car park. They have to have a new access road driven through the town allotments. (There’s a waiting list for these. They are proper up and runner-beaned, working allotments.) The meadows to the south are part of a flood plain. The river Brett has traditionally turned these into effective grazing. And nobody keeps their cows there any more, but they might want to. And these meadows are as much the historical centre of the town as the fine Guildhall. They are history. Would you build a new Tesco on the Cambridge backs if part of St. John’s fell into dereliction? I don’t think so.

I could go on. There are too many reasons to stop this happening. The Hadleigh Society is against it and we in the Civic Initiative have a duty to support them. The local council don’t want it. They have voted fourteen to one against. Some of the shop owners think it will bring them new custom and stop people going to Ipswich. But I don’t believe that in the long term it will. In the long term it will put them out of business. Tesco have the site. The District Council is pushing for it because that’s what their planning officers tell them the Government want. We must surely have learned by now that the Government is not always right. They make noises about local involvement but they don’t really want it, do they? The place for this Tesco is on the by-pass with MacDonalds. Let Hadleigh have more people living on its high street and keep the local small shops which serve them, by keeping it a place to come and walk by the river. Do you think the butcher will thrive or the newsagent prosper with easy one stop shopping in a basket on wheels just down an alley? And I make you a promise, because I have seen this happen, in a few years time the new store “won’t be big enough”. It will need extension. The car park will eat up the “landscaping”, the traffic will be murdering the town and the centre of Hadleigh will be uselessly trying to compete with ring road superstores instead of being what it should be, a small town centre.

It is not necessary for an urban place to have an economic imperative. It can have a service imperative instead or a beautiful living and quiet dignity imperative, perhaps, but District Councils and town planners are still trying to zone up areas. They don’t realize that Hadleigh is already the future: a place with mixed work use, where people live who will have light shopping demands and reward personal service in nice shops. We are still building new faceless dormitories of “housing estates” with medieval street patterns as extensions to our cities and bulldozing the existing real medieval streets to accommodate the ambitions of retail units which need large scale parking and shops so that we can have a centre. These places then die at night and become no go areas. Let the chain stores go. They will throttle small towns. I believe this is considered some sort of modern heresy, akin to the religious opinions that once had radical inhabitants of this town burned to a crisp, but Hadleigh was always dissenting. It has a history of speaking its mind and refusing to follow orthodoxy. I’m quite prepared to follow that. Though I hope it don’t get burned to a crisp.

And actually because of piece I wrote in the newspaper on Sunday the local press are chasing me anyway and the rest of them follow The East Anglian’s lead. And the telly turn up too so we become quite a circus. Naturally enough when they come to broadcast they have found Reg who wants Tesco and accuses me of being a meddling outsider, despite the fact that I was with six or seven insiders all the time I was there. And they want me to do it again, live, and I end up in my garden talking down the line at six o’clock. There’s an enquiry due in the next month or so. It will be interesting to follow. I would go and walk the river walk if I were you, in case it goes. There are deep powers at work here - deeper than the powers of Look East, anyway.

Afterwards I get a nice letter form Nick at Tesco who asks if I want to meet up telling me that they are harmless and everybody loves them.  But I tell him I love them too, and they just need to be sensible and I don’t care what Government policy is.  (Though I had better go and see what they offer. I will try and follow it up.)

But here is a funny thing. I am setting off for France to race in a classic boat race in Marseilles and my agent sends me a text. Tesco want to me to voice a financial services commercial for them.  I haven’t done anything with them for a year or more and two days after my visit to Hadleigh I am offered riches beyond my BBC cheques. Well, I turned them down. It wouldn’t be right to take their money would it? Would it? Sigh. People would only talk. Burned to a crisp, then.