During the mid-90s (post recessionary) period I went to work for Tesco, supporting their site acquisitions activity in south east England. There was a sort of inevitability about this since the only people doing any development AT ALL in the UK at that point were the food retailers and, frankly, the sole question was: which to join?
I'd recently (and, I like to think, reluctantly) been made redundant by Stanhope and 'imself had just been made redundant by the Beckwith lads over at the London & Edinburgh Trust. We had two kids under five at that point and a huge mortgage. Needless to say, I was very grateful for the job.
My experience during the three years that I spent with Tesco (in both Cheshunt and Welwyn Garden City) was quite quite invaluable and has served me brilliantly well ever since. To say that I suffered the worst culture shock but that I learnt a huge amount whilst working there, woud be a bit like saying that Keith Floyd liked the occasional glass of wine !
I knew about offices-and-regeneration but I now needed to know about retail-and-regeneration. I went from working on one scheme in two years to running 70 new stores and 45 extensions at any one time. It was a baptism of fire really.
Do remember this was only a short time after John Gummer had introduced his totally masterly PPG6 (now PPS6), curtailing the development of conforming food stores out-of-town (possibly the most popular planning policy ever introduced - with the British public, that is, sure as hell wasn't popular with the folks working in the property departments of any of the big chains !).
I commited a huge faux pas (one of many really) on my very first day, when the name of Michael Bach was mentioned in a team meeting (Michael was senior planning adviser to the Environment Secretary at that time, the techical draftsman of PPG6, and the weekend running partner/site visitor of my wonderful friend and mentor, the late great, Geoff Marsh) whereupon I unwittingly purred "Ooh what a lovely man", before I could bite back the words.
I was at the Regeneration and Renewal Awards Dinner last night, courtesy of the lovely John Holmes and his team at 