Nature Watch

We sit, here - as still as possible - in a hide cunningly disguised as an ordinary car, parked here on the edge of a normal suburban supermarket car park. Ensconced here we can watch the majestic herds of shopping trolleys as they live out their lives free – at last – from human interference.

This is the UK’s very first Car Park Nature Reserve, cunningly recreated around what used to be an ordinary out of town supermarket, but now the car park – and, indeed, the supermarket - have both been allowed to revert to their natural state where the herds of wild shopping trolleys can roam free down the aisles of the supermarket, bringing back food for their young – the heap of shopping baskets in their nest near the door.

The life-cycle of the shopping trolley has been studied in detail elsewhere, and these fascinating creatures are always a joy to watch as they move in their strange sideways amble, always in the opposite direction to what everyone is expecting, a way of evading their predators that has evolved over the generations.

These mainly peaceable creatures have no real predators apart from roaming drunks and occasional prides of students who will hunt down a trolley and capture it, taking it away from its home trolley park and performing savage rituals involving the poor defenceless trolley before finally brutally sacrificing it to the gods of the canal.