Ankerside Car Park - Tamworth

Easy to find and close enough to town centre so only a short walk! Use this all the time.

Convenient for the shopping complex, but more costly than some of the other nearby council owned car parks. Parking spaces are on the small side if you drive a large/4 x 4 vehicle.

Only providing 2 levels to park ( both levels full ) , lifts and toilets closed . Avoid !

I'm not a huge fan of these concrete jungles, so forgive me for being harsh, but... It was spacious, and at the time when I went, there were ample spaces available, and markings were all over the place, to make pandemic shopping, safer. So what were the negatives? Most importantly; it's 2020, but not only is the parking not automatically calculated from your number plate, like most actively visited places' carparks, but they still don't take any sort of electronic payment. It's just good old fashioned coins and notes physical money, and you need to keep hold of your magnetic ticket card from the year 2000, or you will be in serious hot water at exit time. Make sure you take some pocket shrapnel, or you will be faffing all over to solve the payment out. Secondly; in the pandemic scenario where the most well known location of a ticket machine (next to the toilets), is not accessible due to pandemic murder tape zoning off access to the ticket machine, one might expect along with the other pointing signs and arrows, that someone might consider that people will still need to settle their parking tickets. Maybe they've given up and due to no new people coming to Tamworth, they thought nobody new is coming... Everyone already knows where all the ticket machines are?😂 After finding a machine and struggling to feed it my emergency plastic fiver (I rarely bother carrying change anymore); I was so ecstatic to get my three pound coins of change pop out the under slot, and so distracted about applying antibacterial gel to my hands and coins, that I totally forgot to wait for it to finish processing my ticket card, and walked back to the car! Luckily when I ran back, it was still there on the machine (the one advantage of it being pretty quiet I guess). Apart from that, it wasn't too bad. The expected turning circle/arc as you traverse the ramps to go up and down the floors in your vehicle, are a good natural rate of bend, unlike some of the more modern places that your get paranoid at about clipping the kerb at the ends of ramps. The entry and exit to the carpark can be a bit bumpy due to extreme speed bumps and pot-holes, but one saving grace is that the ramps are at least real ramps with visible white stripe markings, and not those horrid sugar cube things. With the current pandemic related measures, they seem to have restricted exits to one at a time, instead of the usual three lanes (maybe to ease cleaning?). Thankfully it's rarely so busy that it needs all the lanes, so I won't complain about this too much. Driving surface, lighting, cleanliness were fine/acceptable.

Good enough carpark although quite tight turning for an estate car.