Concrete, Dusk and a Lone Greggs: Why Britain's Dullest Car Parks Are Suddenly TikTok Famous

There is a particular shade of grey that a multi-storey car park turns at about 7.14pm in November, and Hollie Bates has driven forty minutes to film it.

We are on the top deck in Nuneaton. Three cars. One puddle. A pigeon doing that walk pigeons do when they've got somewhere to be. Hollie props her phone against a bollard, presses record, and says — quietly, almost to herself — 'silly little walk to the big Tesco.'

The clip is ninety seconds of absolutely nothing. It will do roughly 400,000 views by Friday.

So what actually is a silly little walk?

The format has been drifting around TikTok since late 2024, but 2026 is the year it went full local. The recipe is almost aggressively simple: a phone, a vertical frame, a walk of between eight and forty minutes through somewhere a tourist board would never, ever send you, and a soft voiceover describing the route like it's a nature documentary.

No cuts every 1.4 seconds. No jump-edit chaos. No product placement for a hydration sachet. Just ambient noise — a trolley with a bad wheel, a distant ice-cream van, the drone of a hand dryer through an open fire door — and a caption that reads something like 'silly little walk behind the Halfords.'

What separates it from the 'liminal space' stuff people were posting a few years back is the affection. The old genre was eerie. This one is fond. The creators aren't creeped out by the back of a B&Q. They're weirdly proud of it.

The unofficial rules of a proper silly little walk

• Nothing can be picturesque on purpose. A National Trust garden is out. A car park with one trolley shelter and a view of a Screwfix is in.
• No music, or music so quiet it barely counts. The ambience is the point. If you can't hear a security shutter, you've over-produced.
• The narration stays flat. Deadpan is everything. 'Here's the underpass. It's a bit wet.' That's the whole script.
• You go at the wrong time. 6.40am. 9.20pm on a Tuesday. The clock is half the aesthetic.
• You do not call it a night out. Even though, increasingly, it is one.

The Pluka power ranking of unexpectedly cinematic British locations

1. The top deck of a multi-storey, dusk, no cars. Nothing beats it. Concrete, sodium light, a view of rooftops and a church spire you've never noticed. Somewhere between a film set and a car advert.

2. A retail park with exactly one Greggs. The lone Greggs is the town square of the 2020s. Everyone's there, nobody wants to be, the sausage roll is the social contract.

3. A canal towpath behind a Halfords. The water gives you reflections, the Halfords gives you authenticity, and there is always one swan behaving badly.

4. A pedestrianised precinct at 6am, before the shops open. Just a street sweeper, a stack of wet pallets and the ghost of a Wetherspoons carpet.

5. The underpass with the flickering light. Morally, this one's a swing. Emotionally, it's a banger.

6. The back of a leisure centre, by the bins, where the pool smells of chlorine through the wall. Deeply unglamorous. Weirdly moving.

Why is everyone romanticising places they used to moan about?

Because a night out now costs about the same as a small fridge, and a walk is free. Because the venues have gone and the retail park is what's left. Because 'third places' — the pubs, youth clubs, church halls and community centres that used to soak up an entire adolescence — have thinned out so drastically that a bench outside a Tesco Express has started doing the same job.

'The point isn't that it's nice,' says Lewis Pryce, 23, who runs a Swansea account built entirely around car park sunsets. 'It's that it's ours. Everyone's got one. I can't afford to go to Lisbon, but my car park is genuinely incredible at half seven.'

There's a nostalgia loop in it too. Half these locations are borrowed or earmarked for flats. Filming a precinct is, in a small way, archiving it. In ten years there'll be a documentary about the retail park and someone will have pulled the footage off TikTok.

The mild backlash

Not everyone's convinced. There's a reasonable argument that romanticising a shuttered high street lets somebody off the hook, and that a council which has let the town centre rot shouldn't be getting free cinematography. There's a less reasonable argument, mostly posted under the videos, that it's 'just filming nothing.'

To which the reply is: yes. That's the entire craft.

How to film your own

Go an hour before sunset or after the shops shut. Keep the phone low and slow. Say one honest sentence rather than five clever ones. Don't add a drum track. And for the love of everything, don't stand in the road.

Hollie posts her Nuneaton clip that night and tells me she's got a list of eleven more locations, including a retail park in Hinckley with, and I quote, 'an elite bin area.' Britain does not have a tourism crisis. It has a marketing problem, and the silly little walk is fixing it one puddle at a time.