AN ECCENTRIC author spent three years travelling the UK to wander around supermarket car parks – and then wrote a book on his “ludicrous” hobby.

Gareth Rees, 46, took a bizarre interest in car parks after moving to a new home overlooking a Morrisons car park three years ago.

Since then, the author, who specialises in writing about places, has driven hundreds of miles, visiting retail park and supermarket car parks in Scotland, Wales, Manchester, London, and Plymouth, to name a few.

Father-of-two Gareth, from Hastings, describes car parks as “wildernesses” and has a keen eye for the comings and goings and mundane litter that others overlook. He has visited about 40 car parks up and down the country and researched even more to mention in his book, Car Park Life, which one review called “a retail park Heart Of Darkness”.

He has seen all sorts of weird car parks, from an Asda one in the shadow of a huge oil rig ship at the docks in Scotland, to a waterway founded by Sir Francis Drake next to a B&Q in Devon.

Gareth said: “It’s exciting for me, I love it. I feel a bit like Neil Armstrong on the moon, making unusual observations that haven’t been made before. I had no necessary intention of writing a book on my car park visits but as I started realising car parks are really interesting places, that’s when the idea came together.”

Gareth’s interest began with a drunken walk around a Morrisons car park in 2014 after he moved to a new home in Hastings which overlooked it.

He said: “I realised it was as interesting a place as any other new place – all the different characters passing through it, the creepy foxes on the petrol station forecourt and so on. I wrote a blog post about it, and then I thought maybe I’d carry on.

“So the next day I went to Asda in St Leonards and I found what seemed to be a dinosaur footprint etched into the tarmac. I thought great, that’s two out of two car parks now that I’ve visited that have been interesting.”