BURRY PORT: The land Tesco never built on is up for grabs, and a supermarket is back on the cards

The grassy field between Burry Port station and the harbour, where Tesco once planned a supermarket, is up for grabs, with developers given until the end of the month to bid for it.

Carmarthenshire Council is seeking expressions of interest for the 3.7-acre site by noon on 30 September, offering a 250-year lease for a one-off premium and a peppercorn rent, with the chosen developer first handed a conditional contract to secure planning permission.

The council’s own planning appraisal, prepared by Asbri Planning in June, concludes a commercial or retail scheme, “possibly consisting of a foodstore”, is acceptable in principle and fits its ambitions for regenerating the harbour area.

It is a route the site has been down before. Outline permission for a foodstore and petrol station was granted in 2010, Tesco secured detailed approval for a store there in 2012, and nothing was ever built, with the permissions long since lapsed.

The case for a supermarket rested on a real gap: evidence at the time found the town needed a store big enough for a full weekly shop, with the existing offer geared to top-up shopping that sent bulk buyers out of Burry Port.

Two things have changed since. The Co-op has built a new store in the town, which any fresh retail case would have to weigh, and the council’s new local development plan, expected to be adopted later this year, moves the site just outside the town centre boundary, meaning a future applicant would need to prove the need for a store all over again.

The land itself is grassland and trees crossed by an access road, with the Nant Dyfatty stream running through its western side, the railway station immediately north and the marina to the south.

Its current occupants include badgers. A sett was identified on the bank of the Dyfatty in 2024, and the appraisal says a further survey will be needed to establish how they use the site before anything is built.

Water shapes the site in other ways too: most of it sits in flood zones for both river and sea, so a fresh flood study would be required, with the previous scheme having dealt with the risk through culvert upgrades, a flap valve at East Dock and raised floor levels.

There is a newer wrinkle. Carmarthen Bay’s protected waters are officially in poor condition because of nitrogen pollution, and every planning application in the catchment is now tested against it, though the appraisal argues a store serving people already living locally could clear that hurdle, an approach recently accepted for a foodstore in Ammanford.

The site is one of a set of council-owned plots the Southern Distributor Road was built to unlock, with the harbour masterplan picturing a leisure development by the marina, an enterprise village and new housing around it, and the invitation lands just as the diggers finish the harbour dredge the town waited a decade for, with £2m committed and the masterplan under review.

The push comes at a tender moment for the waterfront economy: just along Ashburnham Road from the site, the Ashburnham Works fell quiet last month as Parsons Pickles, jarring cockles in the town since 1948, was mothballed with eight jobs lost after the cockle harvest collapsed.

Last time round, objections came from town centre traders, the Chamber of Trade and consultants acting for the Co-op, and the appraisal expects any new retail application to face the same scrutiny.

Bids must include sketch proposals, the developer’s track record, funding details and a definitive timetable, judged on both the proposals and the money, with the council not bound to accept the highest or any offer.

Whoever wins still faces the full planning process, so any store remains years away. But for the first time since Tesco walked away, the field by the station has a route to being built on.