Have you ever noticed how many supermarkets have a clock tower? The roots of that apparently unnecessary feature lie in a set of rules established for one Essex town back in the late 1970s
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Video explores why UK supermarkets have clock towers
There’s a strange architectural quirk that links nearly all of the supermarkets built in the UK throughout the Eighties and 1990s. Many of them have a barn-like structure, topped by a purely decorative clock tower.
And it all dates back, filmmaker Chris Spargo says, to one particular branch of Asda in an Essex new town.
Supermarkets were a post-war innovation, imported from the US. Some of the earliest UK examples were ugly, purely functional buildings, with architecture critic Lance Wright comparing some to “concentration camps.”
But when the new town of South Woodham Ferrers was being laid out in Essex in the mid-1970s, planners published a strict guide for architects, to ensure that the community had a harmonious look.
Chris explains: “The council wanted to put a supermarket right next to the town square. But they had a very strict design guide, which required all buildings to have specific Essex characteristics.
“So Asda came up with an idea. 15 miles away in a town called Coggeshall, there is a 14th century barn and a Victorian clock tower.”
Chris admits that, while there’s no conclusive proof that the Asda bosses drew their inspiration from this two buildings, the resultant supermarket looks for all the world like the love-child of the barn and the clock-tower.
The irony, Chris adds, is that this one-off design, intended to complement the architecture of one particular town, became the accidental template for a whole slew of supermarkets scattered across the entire country.
“The original reason for the clock tower was forgotten and the design became known as the Essex Barn style,” Chris says.
These days, the Essex barn has fallen out of favour, and new supermarkets tend to be huge rectangular glass-and-steel edifices that look more modern and, Chris points out, are much cheaper to build.
“More recent supermarkets occasionally have clock towers,” he adds, “but that’s just because it’s kind of an expected thing now.”
Even the more recent supermarket clock towers can’t be relied upon to tell the right time, though, and now more-or-less everyone has a smartphone in their pockets few of us would look up to find out the time anyway.
But the legacy of that seminal Asda building, designed as a one-off but somehow reproduced nationwide, is sure to live on for generations.
Viewers of the clip on YouTube flooded to the comments section to admit they’d only just realised the reason for the similar appearances of supermarkets. One wrote: “Peak Britain, a design that is everywhere and nobody knew why but just kept doing it, and a piece to camera in prime British weather. Love it.”
Another commented: “This is something I’ve simultaneously noticed everywhere and yet never noticed, the perfect topic for a short and interesting video like this. I always wondered why that was so thank you.”
