You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park

Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth Rees explored east London’s edgelands in his hallucinatory Marshlands. Now, with Car Park Life, he reveals an urban wilderness hiding in plain sight: ‘It is Morrisons in Hastings that lights the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside: the car park.’

Strange, often violent stuff happens here: murder, hauntings, sex, from dogging to adultery. Late-night improvised race tracks spring up, where petrolheads compete in hair-raising skid contests, spurred on by whooping spectators. Even in opening hours the clandestine flourishes — who notices what goes on in cars outside Sainsbury’s? Bringing a whole new meaning to cutting-edge retail, a drug dealer stabs one of his customers five times outside an Asda and flees, while police seize £3,000 worth of cocaine. Illicit trade is rife — ‘even cars are sold in car parks’.