After six long and gruelling years, a dad-of-two has finally completed his painstaking quest of parking in every bay of his local supermarket.

Gareth Wild kept a colourful spreadsheet to track his progress and has put together a detailed map of the Sainsbury’s car park, showing the best and worst spaces to use.

The production director has ranked them from ‘god tier’ to ‘avoid’, for regular shoppers and for anyone making a pilgrimage to Bromley to ‘bathe in his glory’.

He has also very helpfully highlighted all trolley bays as well as motorcycle and disabled spaces — which he didn’t include in the 211 parking spots on his list.

Explaining what possessed him to take on such a mammoth task, Gareth told Metro.co.uk: ‘I’ve been going to this store for a while and a part of me really enjoys the mundane things in life and trying gamify them.

‘If you’ve got to do something over and over, how can you make it more interesting and more like you’re collecting something?

‘Originally I was going to plot the number of time I parked in certain bays but it quickly dawned on me that the right thing to do was to try and park in every single one.’

Detailing on Twitter how he achieved his feat, Gareth said: ‘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.’

As someone who does a big shop at the Sainsbury’s once a week, plus the odd additional trip for extras, Gareth, from Bromley, Kent, reckons he pays around 60 visits a year to the supermarket.

He says he could have in theory achieved his goal in four years, but he cut down on his trips out of the house due to he Covid pandemic, and sometimes when he had his kids in he car, he didn’t have time to mess around.

Gareth added: ‘I think 211 spaces in six years – that’s not bad. Obviously you could always push yourself further, but anyone who is that involved is a better person than me.’

To make sure he kept track of his progress, Gareth, 39, split each block of he car park into lettered and coloured categories with numbered spaces, which he ticked off on a corresponding spreadsheet.

Presenting the Excel document to his legion of fans, he said: ‘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.’

When asked why he didn’t include the dates he parked in every single space, Gareth said: ‘Honestly not a day goes by that I don’t regret starting with the dates because by the time I started thinking how useful those dates would have been, I was too far into the project.

‘I could have done half a dataset but what’s the point? It keeps me awake at night – this could have been something even bigger. Just imagine what sort of mapping you could have done with that data.’

A number of factors were considered by Gareth as he ranked the parking spots from god tier to avoid.

He added: ‘I think proximity to the store and the exit is quite up there, distance to the trolley bay. You can’t be too close because it’s really awkward to park next to, but at the same time you don’t want to be too far.

‘Also there’s things like visibility – there’s a couple of spaces in there that aren’t great to reverse into because other cars are coming round the corner at pace. There’s a lot of different criteria which goes into it. These are well considered recommendations and ones to avoid.’

When asked if he had a favourite space in particular, without hesitation, Gareth said: ‘C1, without a shadow of a doubt. C1 is such a dream to drive into, it’s the first spot you see as you enter the car park after the disabled bays and when that’s open it feels like you’ve won the lottery.

‘I feel like it’s quite a high turnover, it’s the sort of space where people go when they’re just picking up something small.’

Gareth wouldn’t have considered himself a car park enthusiast before taking on his challenge, but ever since then he’s spotted things about other parking facilities in his hometown.

He added: ‘There’s other ones in Bromley that I’d quite happily list in my top five.

‘The Glades Shopping Centre has a multi-storey car park which has this helter-skelter thing that’s like the exit ramp.

‘Things like that, little quirks, make them really quite enjoyable. It’s really about finding fun in the banal.’

When asked if he had any more car-park relaed projects on the horizon, Gareth said: ‘Apparently Sydenham, which is just down the road, has the biggest Sainsbury’s in the UK. I don’t know if I’m ready for that, that’s the big leagues. ‘

‘A Lidl did open up at the end of our road, so that might be something which I’ll look into, but I think in all honesty my car park days might be over, who knows, come back to me in another six years.’

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