Tesco opened its latest store today, at Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire. The opening comes more than five years after a new railway tunnel created to provide a site for the store collapsed. The incident on 30 June 2005 came just minutes after my Chiltern Railways train passed through the tunnel.
The irony is that many in the village campaigned against Tesco, yet saw the retailer win a planning appeal. The tunnel collapse meant the village centre was bighted by constriction work for over half a decade. Work didn't resume until 2009, because of safety concerns and the replacement of the original contractors, Jackson Civil Engineering of Ipswich.
Here's the photo I took of the ruins just days after the tunnel collapsed in 2005. And here's my blogpost about Tesco Gerrards Cross a year after the incident.
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