Given that a big supermarket could fight any existing covenants / council planning rules, I wonder how big they'll want their Hibbert Lane £12m supermarket to be?
Well, definitely nowhere near as big as this Tesco Extra planned for Pendleton, in the middle of a huge urban area next to Salford Shopping City and a few minutes from MediaCity and Manchester city centre. The money might have gone to a school but you couldn't find a more different comparison to leafy small-town Hibbert Lane if you tried.
I'm thinking more that what we might see in Marple is a mixed use development, with a mid-size supermarket and car park at one end of the site and new housing to bring in an immediate profit on the sale at the other. Win-win for a supermarket chain and a far better option than pure housing to me (which I assume is the alternative Marple In Action want?!).