Who keeps driving cars into this Tesco Express?
Someone really wants to destroy a supermarket in Stratford, to the exasperation of low-paid supermarket staff who are having to pick up the pieces.
We weren’t planning to bring you another edition after a week of tube strike coverage and trying to find the busiest Lime bike parking zone in the capital. But a mystery is unfolding in east London that is so curious we felt we had to publish it now.
Two weeks ago we received a message from a reader (get in touch with us here) asking us to investigate why someone kept crashing cars into their local Tesco Express in Stratford. “There has been a big spate of supermarket robberies in east London,” they said. “We have a lot of narrative around shoplifting but this is the organised, aggressive escalation.”
At first we thought the car attacks were a new approach to shoplifting. Instead, it turned out to be something much more puzzling. On four occasions in the last three weeks someone has driven a car at speed into the front of the same supermarket, smashing the shop open. But, mysteriously, no goods have been taken. Instead it appears to be an attempt to cause the maximum damage and keep this specific Tesco closed.
Today, for members, we have an investigation into a bizarre shopping mystery that takes in stolen cars, suggestions TikTok is teaching people how to steal cigarettes, and unfounded smears about a turf war with a rival supermarket.
Scroll down to read the story — it’s just after two quick updates on recent London Centric investigations.
How a tiny start-up news outlet funded by readers like you is prompting politicians to act.
Baroness Pidgeon (aka former London Assembly member Caroline Pidgeon) is the Liberal Democrat transport spokesperson in the House of Lords. A London Centric reader, she told us she organised an urgent House of Lords debate on drivers inhaling nitrous oxide at the wheel after reading our investigation into growing usage in Tower Hamlets.
The parliamentary debate is worth looking up, with the Labour minister Lord Hanson warning about the difficulty of bringing a prosecution: “It is quite difficult for the police to identify nitrous oxide later on because it disappears from the blood system very quickly.”Scottish cabinet minister Angus Robertson has demanded “immediate action” from the government following London Centric’s stories about tax-evading gift shops in units rented from billionaire landlord Asif Aziz.
Robertson, one of the most important figures in the SNP, said our reporting on the people who live in down-at-heel west London flats while supposedly running some of Edinburgh’s leading gift shops is a “must read” that “exposes very serious questions”. He has asked both the Scottish and UK governments to act on the story. At London Centric we increasingly believe that shops engaging in “phoenixing” to evade taxes is one of the least understood but most important scandals in the capital. This, rather than the old-fashioned money laundering that many people suspect, may explain the state of many of London’s shopping streets. Asif Aziz has yet to respond to our questions about why his Criterion Capital company repeatedly rents the same shops to people who vanish without paying their taxes.
“Very unhinged”: The strange tale of the person who keeps crashing cars into a London supermarket.
By Cormac Kehoe and Jim Waterson
The Tesco Express on Stratford High Street is a typical mini supermarket, just like thousands of similar shops around London. This one is located at the base of a new-build block of flats called Opal Court on a busy road in a rapidly-gentrifying corner of east London. Yet in the last three weeks, on four separate occasions, a car has been driven at speed through the shop’s windows in the middle of the night, forcing the store to close for extended periods of time.
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Now, local MP Uma Kumaran has told London Centric that a “lone individual acting in a very unhinged way” appears to be behind these attacks and could be on the loose in the Stratford area. She fears this is endangering low-paid Tesco staff who are already suffering from a crime wave at the store, which has been targeted by thieves who upload videos of their crimes to TikTok.
The MP added: “It’s scary for staff who shouldn’t have to work in those conditions and it’s scary for the residents when you think some maniac’s doing this. It contributes to this feeling of lawlessness. We have to take back our high streets and town centres from thugs like this.”
The attacks on the shop would traditionally be classed as a ram raid, a type of burglary where a vehicle is used as a weapon to break into a shop to gain entry and steal goods. Yet something stranger is happening. On every occasion, sources told London Centric, rather than entering the Tesco Express through the gaping hole in its window and grabbing high-value goods, the driver has jumped out of the vehicle and run off down the nearby Warton Road towards the Olympic Park.
The driver is always “masked up and wearing black from head to foot”, according to two sources who have viewed CCTV of the incidents, who both concluded that it is the same individual each time.
Staff at the Tesco Express are increasingly fearful for their personal safety and already work long hours in low-paid roles for the supermarket giant while confronting thieves. Asked who was responsible for repeatedly driving into the window of their shop, Ashley, the store’s longstanding and exasperated security guard told us: “I don’t know, and I don’t care. No one’s doing anything, it’s never going to stop.”
But in the local community, speculation abounds — with people spreading unfounded smears that a new rival independent supermarket is involved, whispers about organised crime, and claims police failed to intercept a gang who unknowingly stole a tracking device from the shop.
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