No store, no update: Tesco keeps Greenford in the dark a year after closure

Tesco has kept Greenford waiting almost a year for its promised Broadway store, despite pledging to keep residents updated.

When the 58-year-old Greenford Road store closed on 29 October last year, a spokesperson told EALING.NEWS Tesco was “always looking for the best ways to serve local communities” and would open a smaller Express in the former Boots on The Broadway, keeping “the local community updated”.

That update has not come. “I haven’t had any outreach from Tesco,” said Anthony Kelly, Labour councillor for Greenford Broadway. Tesco did not respond to requests for comment.

The delay is not down to planning. Tesco drew up designs for the new shop nine months before the old one closed, and won permission for its shopfront six months before. Yet the unit remains empty.

Tesco gave no reason for the closure. But in the same month it drew up the Broadway plans, it offered the Greenford Road site to the council for redevelopment, meaning it had been preparing the switch for at least nine months.

Cllr Kelly suspects Tesco has changed its mind. “It’s a big risk for operators to go into this area. Shops can’t make money there, so they’re closing all the time,” he said. “Tesco go for new developments where there’s people who bought flats for £400,000; if they can afford that, they can afford whatever Tesco charges for oat milk nowadays.”

The former Boots has stood empty for nearly three years. Santander and Halifax have followed suit, with chicken shops replacing one unit while the other remains vacant.

Meanwhile, the old Tesco location is set to become a wedding venue. Even its owner’s planning statement wrongly told the council Tesco had moved to The Broadway.

“I don’t see how closing such a significant store and opening a much smaller one…is ‘looking for the best ways to serve local communities’,” Greenford resident John-Joyce Rundell wrote on Facebook last year. “That is certainly NOT serving the community.”