IKEA has confirmed it will shut its large Coventry UK store and the question now being asked is what will happen to the plans for building one in Lancing.

Well, going by what appeared in the media in June of last year, it is by no means certain a new retail store will ever get built on the Monks Farm site because, at that time, the company said that although it continued to be flying high as far as profits were concerned, it was now turning some of its megastores into distribution centres for home delivery and, as consumer demand for some of its out-of-town ones had waned, it had started investing in smaller stores and city-centre shops, together with new services such as furniture assembly.

That being the case why on earth would Ikea still want to build a shop in Lancing when it has already admitted that out-of-town stores were becoming out of date, because the public was fallen out of love with them and that it was already converting some of the present shops into warehouses for online shopping?

And all of this eight months before they took the decision to shut up shop in Coventry.

Coupled with the other fact that Ikea has covered itself by saying that it will wait for the new roads and site to be prepared before it progresses its part of the overall development, the chances that the public will be flocking to this part of Sussex to buy their ready-to-assemble furniture, and other Swedish stuff, looks less and less likely as the years and months tick by.

Eric Waters, Lancing