The honour, presented by the UK Guild of Car Parks and Carparking (UKGCPC), was due to go to the rather more pleasant Riverside car park – but can only be awarded to lots which do not charge. “We’re delighted,” said a spokesman for the Barford Road store, “especially since the car park was rather an afterthought when the store was extended.”

Local rags and forums have been full of complaints about the new layout, which is heavily based on the temporary design used whilst building works were carried out. “I’ll tell you what it is: it’s jokes,” commented Chapman Way man Peter Ropefellow, 60. “Obviously I don’t drive into Tesco because I live next door… ah fuck it, I totally drive there every day, on account of being well fucking lazy. There are less spaces than there used to be, and the access roads are proper narrow and that, meaning I have to actually slow down when entering the car park. Pathetic. I used to shoot round the old one at sixty, never hit anyone yet!”

Local councillor Steve van der Whitevanman, who has long been a public opponent of everything Tesco do ever, ranted “I knew this’d fucking happen if we started charging people to park in the Riverside and at Lidl. It’s not on. It’s all the fault of those nasty Tories, you know.”

Van der Whitevanman said he had contacted the UKGCPC, who admitted that a town was drawn randomly from a hat each year and the car park closest to the town centre picked. “They told me that they never visit any of the towns involved, because there’s only two of them in the office. Roger has to answer the phones, and Mary can’t drive, apparently.”

Roger Shelley of the Guild stated that “We never award the, er, award to somewhere that charges, because we like to make the criteria a bit harder than ‘must be a car park’.”

The newly-extended Tesco Extra has come under fire recently for having more expensive petrol than another store twelve miles away, and occasionally running out of some stock. Ongoing claims that the store is “some sort of alien mothership” are still being denied.

Claims that they’ve been “told” to reign their necks in by their political leaders after several daft comments on a well known local website are dismissed as “not funny enough” by commentators. Instead speculators have proposed a number of more realistic options about where our representatives have gone.

Top of the list is the high probability that the majority of Town Council members have been subjected to an alien abduction. Local twins, Lil and Greta Paxton, who share a lifelong passion for astronomy, reported seeing “strange lights in the sky” last month just before the disappearance.

Greta told The Citizen “We was coming out of The Anchor on a Tuesday night when Lil went arse over tit. While she was flat out she told me the world was spinning and there were bright pink lights over her head.”

“I immediately put 2 and 2 together and can categorically state that all our councillors are currently being probed by aliens.”

The Citizen, as ever, thinks this to be a highly probable and profitable headline maker and we back the women’s claims.

ET had gone home and was unavailable for comment.

Since this story was published in the Citizen six years ago, the chain has been dogged by claims of alien involvement.

“This has simply got to stop,” said spokesman Ian Morrison. “Yes, I am well aware that since the story was published we have opened another store in Eaton Socon as well as taking over One Stop in Eynesbury and Eaton Ford. But these are merely business expansion and are certainly not ‘spawns’.”

“Off the record,” he continued, “if you’re looking for E.T. selling goods in St Neots it wouldn’t hurt to look at Waitrose…”

Eynesbury resident Bob Smethy, 39, claimed to have been abducted by the store in 2002. Since then he has resided at Priory Grange where he is being treated for a number of mental health conditions.

“Is right though,” said Smethy. “They took me aboard and no-one believed me, well, look at me now! They implanted a small piece of plastic on me to track my every move!”

We did point out that Mr Smethy could merely discard what was obviously his Clubcard, but he seemed not to agree.

Local council leader Derek Miles said that the town council would investigate these claims, but that it was “unlikely that any local supermarket is extra-terrestrial.”

The case continues.

The St Neots store was recently refurbished, and was advertised as being the first in the country to get the new “green glass” look. But residents of the Parklands estate, oppostie the store, became worried that the store was not of this world.

“Well,” said Paul Capel, of Caernarvon Way, “ever since the store re-opened after it were done up, there’s been this green light shining over Eynesbury. It’s really wierd. i thought nothing of it at first but now I have heard that Bob [Smethy] from two doors down were absucted by ‘em.”

Mr Smethy, 33, claimes he was beamed aboard the store late one Friday evening when walking home from the Cambridgeshire Hunter. “I were suddenly in this big white room,” he said. “These funny little beings, some red, some blue, were talkin’ to me in a strange voice, and I couldn’t make out a word of it. There were all these beeping noises going on as well. I were packin’ me pants, I can tell ya.”

Friends of Mr Smethy, who had been drinking with him that night in the Berkley Street pub, said he was “not pissed enough to imagine something like that.”

“I were tempted,” continued Smethy, “to put it down to bein’ a bit less than sober, like. But me mates said, ‘nah Bob, y’only had about nine pints’ so I thought it probably weren’t that. Still, I weren’t too worried – it were a one-off thing and, as far as I can tell, I didn’t get probed in any way, anal or otherwise.
Then I realised – Eynesbury manor! Them poor people shellin’ out hundreds of thousands to live within the radioactive field of this spacecraft. Somebody think of the children!”

No-one from the Cheshunt, Herts, based retailer was available for interview, but their press office issued the following statement:

“As far as we are concerned, Tesco St Neots is not, and has never been, an extra-terrestrial mothership of any kind. We believe Mr Smethy’s experience was down to being intoxicated. The red and blue ‘beings’ were in fact night-shift workers in their new uniforms, and the beeping noises were of course the 24-hour checkouts.
The green glow is caused by fluorescent lighting shining through the green glass. We are working on a way to reduce this.”

Despite Tesco’s reassurances, no houses were sold on Eynesbury manor this weekend – however this may be due to flooding. mr Smethy was taken to Hinchingbrooke Hospital to be “monitored”. No black helicopters were reported in the area.