"colour, sound, architecture and display"

Commerce For the past six months, we've slowly watched a chunk of the view from our window become blotted out by a giant man made ediface, the new Tesco on Park Road. Looking out across the landscape, from its gleaming roof to the Welsh mountains beyond, we have an even greater sense of mankind purposefully destroying the awe of nature. Robin from Seven Streets has visited:

"It’s common to hear the term Ballardian applied to nightmarish urban landscapes, but really Ballard was as much about the effects of these gleaming, artificial, brightly-lit edifices of society. JG would have loved this new Tesco: its enormous underground car-park; its overpowering use of colour, sound, architecture and display; its order and routine. There’s a sense that people are here to service this great building, rather than the other way around; acting out a comforting familiar ritual among fonts and colours and noises that they recognise."

As the streets surrounding us fill with desperate advertising for Sefton Park Asda (on Smithdown Road but nevertheless) covered with the beaming faces of the shop staff in a desperate bid to give them a kind of artificial humanity in comparison to this Tesco Star Destroyer, it's clear that the war to protect consumer choice has been lost.