For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all. This week I completed my Magnum Opus! A thread.

I live in Bromley and almost always shop at the same Sainsbury’s in the centre of town, here’s a satellite view of their car park. It’s a great car park because you can always get a space and it is laid out really well. Comfortably in my top 5 Bromley car parks.

After quite a few years of going each week I started thinking about how many of the different spots I’d parked in and how long it would take to park in them all. My life is one long roller coaster.

Rather than walking around the car park counting each space and exposing myself as a lunatic, I used the overhead view to mark out a vector image to make it easier to identify each space.

The orange boxes dotted around the car park are trolley bays, the black space is an irregular shaped patch which is too small for a car and is therefore void and then there are a number of family, disabled and a motorcycle bays.

I don’t own a motorcycle and I’m not disabled but I do have children so I can legitimately use the family spaces. This means that in the car park there are 211 parking spaces that I needed to conquer.

I do a big shop once a week with the occasional additional trip to pick up extras but a conservative figure of 60 visits a year meant that I could in theory have completed my challenge in under four years. Annoyingly a global pandemic slowed me down.

To make it easy for me to identify which space I was parking in I assigned each ‘block’ a letter and within each block, bay numbers which I would make note of on my phone and then add it all to my super awesome spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet has been given a bit of extra razzle dazzle to spruce it up a bit for presentation but this is it, this is 6 years of monotony.

For anyone keen on taking a pilgrimage to the Bromley Sainsbury’s car park to bathe in my glory I’ve also marked out the best and worst spots to park because I’m such a swell guy. Seriously though, avoid the spaces next to the trolley bays, they’re just terrible.

I will now be taking a short AMA for all you car park nuts. Fire away.

If you like car parks you'll love donating to food banks, @BromleyFoodbank do amazing work across the borough and have drop off bins in Sainsbury, so why not visit the historic car park and do some good whilst you're there!