No, YOU'VE spent all day looking at old cars at Sainsbury's
Yes, this is a picture of a Sainsbury’s supermarket. In 1983. No, we’ve not had a momentary brain failure and forgotten what we’re meant to be uploading to TopGear.com.
You see, one of Britain’s favourite places to do ‘the big shop’ has had the good grace to take photos of its car parks. For decades. And then pop them all on its website for socially inept nerds like us to spend literal hours of our lives poring through. There are over 8,000 pictures, after all.
The reason it’s become our new favourite pastime? The truly rich seam of retro tat (and occasional retro gold) that fills those car parks. This is a peek at what British shoppers were packing their tins of Spam and bottles of Babycham into long before these same car parks were chockful of samey SUVs.
So click through, tell us your favourites below, and if 18 images of old cars in car parks aren’t enough for you, go and peruse the other 8,302 pictures (seriously) right here.
STORY Stephen Dobie
IMAGES © The Sainsbury Archive, Museum of London Docklands
“Don’t mind us, just packing our wildly innovative jellymould Sierra with bland Eighties food.”
If the Sainsbury’s Archive teaches us anything, it’s that Brits blooming love a Ford. There are many in this picture, most notably a Fiesta XR2 with spotlights. Cor.
YET MORE FORDS. In a much more varied palette of colours than the row of Qashqais likely sitting in the very same spaces as you read this.
This picture contains not only a Talbot Samba, but the first and only SUV of this whole gallery.
Just look at that Citroen, likely commodious enough to take the entirety of the frozen goods aisle home.
Ford, Vauxhall and Rover dominated Eighties and Nineties Britain. But look closer and you’ll see the E28 BMW 5 Series, the Peugeot 205, the Triumph Vitesse… It’s like Where’s Wally? without any of the frustration.
Think you know BMW model codes? Well tell us which one sits bottom left in this image, then. Also, how sweet is that Mini?
Let it be known that TopGear.com loves - in unhealthy amounts - Peugeot 309 GTIs. Where 99.99999 per cent of humans look at this picture and shrug their shoulders at a mundane snapshot of life in Bedford circa 1994, we look at it and need to go and have a quiet sit down by ourselves.
Look! Another 309 GTI! And - if you really focus - there’s only a flipping Toyota AE86, the great forefather of today’s skidtastic GT86. God we love Sainsbury’s car parks in Cobham in 1989.
We really do love 1989, where petrol is 35p a litre. Y’know, like a whole entire pound less than it is now. Also, those opening hours…
If you look up ‘defunct British things’ in the dictionary we’re pretty sure you should be greeted with an image of a Reliant three-wheeler parked near a Woolworths.
Rustington Sainsbury’s is no longer as aesthetically interesting. Nor, we suspect, is this row of spaces, filled as it most likely is in 2020 with six Vauxhall Mokkas and a Nissan Juke.
What the heck is the orange car on the left? No cheating on the DVLA website, please…
What the heck is the orange car on the left? No cheating on the DVLA website, please…
You want a window into 1975 motoring? Why, it’s picking up some milk from the shop and coming to find your Vauxhall Viva completely unwilling to take you and said milk back home. At least there’s a pair of accommodation options in the next row of spaces.
Oh hi, delightful BMW ‘02 shark nose. What chance a sodding X2 sits in this exact space right now.
A vinyl roof, a rubber-bumpered MG, a mk1 Scirocco, a Volvo decades before Volvos were cool… We have reached peak retro and shall now extract ourselves from the Sainsbury’s Archive. A sentence we never, ever thought we’d need to type.
