Supermarket giant Tesco is selling
off more than a dozen sites that it no longer wants to develop to a
property company in a £250m deal.
Some 10,000 homes could be built on the sites in London, the South East and Bath.
They are part of nearly 50 projects which Tesco said earlier this year it was abandoning, many of which are now derelict.
The decision was part of the supermarket's revival strategy.
Tesco is selling the sites to Meyer Bergman, a property investment firm.
Markus Meijer, its chief executive, said the investment would give new impetus to the abandoned Tesco projects.
Tesco said in January that it was shelving plans to open 49 large supermarkets - some of which had already been built - as well as closing 43 unprofitable stores.
The move formed part of chief executive Dave Lewis's strategy to restore the company's fortunes in the wake of an accounting scandal in 2014.
However,
the decision to abandon planned new stores attracted criticism. Pat
McFadden, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East, where a major
supermarket plan was mothballed, said that the local community felt let
down.
'Right decision'
Alan
Stewart, chief financial officer, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme
that Tesco would not be developing stores on the mothballed sites it
still owned.
"We don't have the resource to put into these
developments," he said. "The right decision for us and the business is
not to go ahead."
Tesco: Houses are more lucrative than shops
The development sites being sold by Tesco include:
- Fulham High Street
- Highams Park (next to existing Tesco store)
- Hounslow (Hounslow bus garage)
- Lewisham (next to existing Tesco store)
- New Barnet (East Barnet Road)
- St Albans (London Road)
- Tolworth (Former MOD site next to Tolworth Broadway and A3)
- Hillingdon Master Brewer Site (Hillingdon Circus)
- Woolwich Phase 3 and 4 (next to existing Extra store)
- Epsom (Upper High Street)
- Kensington (next to existing Cromwell Road store, pictured below)
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