Arbroath’s Front Door

The Biggest Farmfoods in Angus!

Nostalgic summers of Arbroath. Sandcastles, ice cream, dodgems, fish and chips, and those spinning umbrellas you stick in the sand.

What kills that feeling quicker than trolleys rolling around a rubbish-strewn car park beside a large retail unit?

Arbroath may soon have a new Farmfoods on the site of the former Hotel Seaforth. Not just any Farmfoods. THE BIGGEST FARMFOODS IN ANGUS! (Internal Trump voice).

After laying their flowers at the war memorial on Remembrance Sunday, Arbroathians may soon be able to look out to sea and say: “Did you know that is the biggest Farmfoods in Angus? Montrose had the title, but we won it in 2026.”

The site sits on one of the main routes into town, beside the West Links, surrounded by paddling pools, putting, wee cars, an amusement arcade, and faded but still visible seaside fun. There are old postcards from this exact spot. It is Arbroath’s front door.

A team has just been appointed to deliver a £20 million plan to regenerate Arbroath. It is hard to see how adding a large retail unit to a prominent recreation area supports that vision. Harder still to see how another project, designed to draw people to a car park away from surviving small independent shops and cafes, sits comfortably beside wider regeneration or the aims of A Place for Everyone.

Arbroath was never Blackpool, but its tourism was real. At its mid-century height, tens of thousands visited places like Kerr’s Miniature Railway each year. Visitor numbers had fallen sharply before the final train ran. The Harbour Visitor Centre closed too. And in perhaps the greatest insult to Arbroathians, the road train was sold off to the people of Brechin. Well, technically to the Caledonian Railway, but that ruins the joke.

Despite this, the town’s seaside is not dead.

It has thinned out, piece by piece.

This is not an argument for recreating the past. It is an argument that what remains still has value, and should not be chipped away by every “better than nothing” proposal that arrives.

Better Than Nothing

Perhaps the site should become a proper campervan stop: a practical 2026 answer to increasing numbers of vans and caravans visiting the town in recent years. Perhaps it should be opened up as grass and public space. Maybe there are better ideas.

“But the Council can’t just do what it wants with the land,” people will say.

Maybe not. But if private ownership leaves a prominent seaside site empty for decades, at some point, planning has to mean more than grabbing whatever proposal eventually appears and putting a regeneration headline on it.

If Farmfoods wants to leave the High Street, and the demand is for big units, can we not at least place them strategically, in a way that serves the character of the town rather than weakens it?

Perhaps the difficulty is zoning or available sites. If so, it is odd that the planning system cannot produce a better location among existing industrial, residential, or retail areas, yet is somehow flexible enough to interrupt seaside parkland.

The case for it is obvious enough: fill the site, create some jobs, move on. And yes, there is probably no credible leisure use ready for this site in 2026.

But that is not planned regeneration. That is filling gaps and hoping the town regenerates around them. At some point, the questions should be: why do people come here? And what is the wider value of this space?

The Value of Empty Space

A patch of open ground beside the sea can hold future tourism possibility: campervans, staycations, coolish North Sea summers, whatever version of seaside recreation comes next. It can protect a view. Soften an entrance. A frozen food warehouse does not do that.

Maybe the principle is not that complicated. If Arbroath has a front door, this is surely part of it. The bit that tells people where they are.

Other towns seem to benefit from “No” when it protects the thing that makes a place worth visiting. St Andrews would not put large retail by the Old Course or the West Sands. Dundee would not fill one of the long-vacant spaces around Slessor Gardens with frozen food. Montrose, current holder of the biggest Farmfoods in Angus, has managed not to place it by the beach.

Some spaces carry more value than their development footprint.

What is it that draws all those campervans to Arbroath these days? A visit to Farmfoods?

No.

I would imagine the seaside remains the pull.

However faded, should that not be protected?

Arbroath’s seafront should not be treated like spare ground.

Michael — Without Invitation