A - Z Challenge 2024 - S is for Supermarket

This year I'm blogging about my local area.  

My area?  Highams Park which is in the borough of Waltham Forest in North East London, (UK) a little known place that nestles between Chingford and Woodford that most people only come to if they have a specific reason to - if not we usually get bypassed.  Suits us.

Having lived in Forest Gate in East London for 36 years (and for my husband 65 years!) moving was a big deal for us.  But we've been in Highams Park since September 2020 so I feel I know enough about it now to fill out 26 posts! 

We've only moved just over 5 miles but we didn't know this area at all before moving here.  Although of course we did have a good look around when looking for a house and there were a number of things we wanted on our check list.

One necessity is food so we wanted a good supermarket nearby.

We have a big Tesco store right in the centre of town:

It isn't one of their biggest style stores but it has the full range of groceries plus a small home department as well as clothing, toys, books etc.  It also has a Costa Coffee area.  There aren't any other concessions in there but it does serve our immediate day to day needs.  And to be honest, we still get our weekly shop delivered - from Tesco.  They have a good delivery service that we relied on heavily during the pandemic and continue to use.

One slightly unusual feature of the store is that the car parking areas are on the ground and basement levels, while the actual shopping floor is on the first floor.  This necessitates using the travellator or lifts to get from your car to the shop.  Fine when everything is working normally but, the lifts in particular seem to regularly have problems.  Of course if the travellator isn't working you can still walk up and down them but you can't push a trolley up or down them.  Not good if you have heavy bags of shopping.  Thankfully, because we get our main shop, particularly the heavy bulky things delivered this hasn't been too much of a problem for us.  It does spark heated debate on Facebook though.

We also have several smaller grocery stores but Tesco is a good all round store for when you need for example an extra small frying pan, or some socks or a present and card for someone.  Or new bath mats.

They also have a collecting basket for the Foodbank I volunteer at and a bookshelf of second hand books raising money for charity.  Oh and a big tick in my checklist - toilets!