Biography | Ken Murphy — Tesco House on the Morning He Took the Keys, 1 October 2020

Tesco did not hire a grocer.

On 2 October 2019 the company told the market, in a Regulatory News Service statement issued with its half-year numbers, that Dave Lewis would leave and Ken Murphy would succeed him.

Lewis had spent five years repairing Tesco after the 2014 accounting scandal.

Murphy was still under contract to Walgreens Boots Alliance.

The start date had to wait.

It landed on 1 October 2020.

Reuters recorded the first week: he backed Lewis's strategy, faced a pandemic cost spike, and declined to sketch a new empire on day one.

The building attached to that date is Tesco House, Shire Park, Kestrel Way, Welwyn Garden City.

Companies House lists it as the registered office.

The old headquarters on Delamare Road in Cheshunt, occupied since 1973, had already been emptied.

Tesco consolidated here in 2015 and 2016.

The Cheshunt site was later cleared for housing.

Shire Park is a business park of low office blocks and roundabouts on the north-east edge of the garden city.

The photograph with this pin is an office block inside that park, not a labelled portrait of Tesco House itself.

The supermarket's headquarters sits among those blocks.

Murphy took the job in the first autumn of Covid restrictions, when a visit to a store was easier to defend than a visit to a campus.

The Grocer later summarised the five-year scorecard under him: volumes up, UK share the best since 2016, the share price at a record.

Those numbers belong to later years.

The moment on this pin is narrower.

A Boots lifer from Cork sat down in a Hertfordshire business park as group chief executive of Britain's largest grocer, on a date the company and the wires both printed as 1 October 2020.

Photo: Humphrey Bolton, office block in Shire Park, Welwyn Garden City, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph