August 2000: Eddie 'The Eagle' soars over Ludlow

But not every Shropshire supermarket is officially opened by Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards.

And not every supermarket is as controversial as the Tesco store in Ludlow which Eddie officially opened on Monday, August 14, 2000.

For those who don't know, Eddie The Eagle was a British star of the winter Olympics of 1988 held in Calgary, not because he did well in the ski jump – he came last – but because of his sheer pluck and persona.

Eddie was the celebrity opener of the store on the corner of Station Drive and Corve Street and marked it by skiing down the side of the building, or rather appearing to ski down it. He was really abseiling while wearing skis and carrying rods.

Dozens of locals gathered in the street to watch his stunt.

“I’ve done this sort of thing several times before but it’s the first time I’ve done a supermarket,” he said.

And Eddie said that the building was "beautiful," which was not an opinion shared by a body of public opinion in the historic town.

Members of the Sealed Knot Society, a civil war re-enactment group, also joined Eddie to round off the opening ceremony by firing long-barrelled muskets.

The cost of the new Tesco, which was built on the old cattle market site and had an innovative wave-like roof similar to a ski slope, was put at £9 million.

Customers our reporter spoke to on that day welcomed the store, which had provided 220 jobs for local people and a 20,000sq ft sales area.

Built in under eight months, it had 19 checkouts and a 72-seat customer cafe.

There was no shortage of detractors, both on the grounds of design and on the impact on town centre businesses. The planning process had been tortuous, including a public inquiry after which Environment Secretary John Gummer refused planning permission on design grounds in 1997.

That still left the door open, as all Tesco needed to do was come up with an acceptable design, which eventually it did. It was proposed to have a eyecatching tower as one of its main features.

Ludlow Civic Society thought that that would look like a stranded lighthouse and Councillor Dr Gerald St John Penney told the district council's planning committee: "It is every architect’s job to leave a scar on the planet. This tower really will leave a scar on the planet because it is shameful.”

But councillors heard that the proposed tower had won approval from the Royal Fine Art Commission and had been designed by a "leading team of architects".

The building today doesn't have anything most people would consider a tower, but maybe it's the thing that Eddie abseiled down.

One writer to Star Mail said the supermarket spoilt a gateway to Ludlow and described it as the "Ludlow Dome", an allusion to the Millennium Dome in London.

"It will go down in history. Future generations will say 'who did it?' – that is, if it stands that long," our correspondent wrote.

Residents at nearby Glencoe Terrace had won payouts of between £1,000 and £2,000 from Shropshire County Council after they claimed their lives had been “blighted” by the construction of the development.

But in the way of these things the new supermarket won praise in the 2001 Civic Trust Awards.

Judges said it was a valuable contribution to the vitality of the town.

They said: “The interior of the supermarket is light and airy with clear views of the sky and a refreshing contrast with conventional supermarkets.”

And one of those residents who won a payout, who had declared that he would only ever visit the store if there was 6ft of snow stopping him getting into town, admitted after the resolution of the dispute to going to the new Tesco to get his milk and other shopping.

Ludlow's Tesco was also praised by English Heritage as a model for how modern development can be incorporated into historic towns.

For Ludlow residents who didn't think the supermarket fitted in to the street scene there was to be more suffering in the pipeline in the form of the town's new library and museum resource centre, the design of which caused similar controversy.

In a poll, Shropshire Star readers voted it as Shropshire's biggest eyesore.