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Tesco creates waves in seaside holiday town
25th March 2008
A fascinating business story buried in the home news section of the Independent today. Supermarket giant Tesco has bought the Lyme Bay Holiday Village, only to immediately close it.
You can read the full article here.
The 152 staff at the Lyme Bay Holiday Village have received redundancy letters informing them that the village, which hosts 40,000 people a year, will close next January to make way for a new development including a large supermarket, a visitor centre and tourist accommodation.
Looks like this might turn into a classic business versus local stakeholder conflict. Tesco wants to build another superstore (the tenth within a 22 mile radius); the local community have lost a nursery, swimming pool and source of employment from the holiday industry.
To get a feel for the kind of locality involved, I quickly looked up the Holiday Village on Google Earth. This is the battleground, as seen by satellite:
