Discount culture – 25 years after Aldi's arrival on British shores

Could it be possible to trace social history of a city and its hardships via the stories and sympathies of its shop workers?

It was 25 years ago when the first Aldi opened in Stechford, Birmingham. I met, quite by chance, the grandson of Stechford's original grocer. The family was put out of the shopkeeping business not by the German discount superstore but by their own upward mobility.

Ian Blakeman, 49, was a well-known prison governor; he's now at the National Offender Management Service. "My mother would never drink Coke because they stored vinegar in the bottles and she once took a mouthful by accident," he told me, as we waited on a train platform.