Gareth Wild

Gareth Wild is a production director who, in 2021, completed a six-year self-administered challenge to park in all 211 legal parking spaces in his local Sainsbury's car park in Bromley, Greater London. This achievement and his method of doing so went viral online, attributed to its timing during the COVID-19 pandemic and Wild's dedication to the mundane challenge for an extended amount of time, and received coverage in the national and international press. In 2026 Wild completed a second challenge, parking in all 108 parking spots of the Sainsbury's in Devizes, Wiltshire.

Challenge

Wild, a production director for Explosive Alan Productions, thought of the challenge in 2015 while doing his weekly shop, having done so at the same shop for a decade. He had initially decided to simply log the spaces in which he had parked in his local Sainsbury's car park, but soon decided to make a game out of this. He created a spreadsheet to log the spaces he had parked in and created a plan, taking a screenshot of the car park in Google Maps, dividing the car park into lettered sections and assigning numbers to its individual spaces. Wild initially believed he could complete the challenge in four years.

Each time Wild drove to the supermarket, he logged the space in which he had parked on his mobile phone and added it to his spreadsheet upon returning home. Wild has said that his completion of the challenge was "inevitable" once he had parked in all the spaces except "the last 20 or 30", and that he "was getting one each week". He was age 39 at the time. He additionally provided a guide of the best and worst spaces in the car park.

Responses The announcement that Wild had completed the challenge was positive, with his post on Twitter receiving over 100,000 likes by 28 April. Wild attributed this to people enjoying "a nerdy challenge" and that "people love a spreadsheet." The tweets prompted others to describe their similar exploits, such as one user who had mapped over 70 potholes in his town, classifying them for severity. Wild took advantage of the virality by asking viewers to donate to a local food bank, causing donations to come in from across the world. He also stated that he was asked by other supermarkets had asked him to do the same challenge at their stores, including one which promised to donate money to charity for every ten spaces he parked in to go shopping. His story received coverage on BBC News, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph.

Thomas Fletcher, chairman of the Leisure Studies Association and associate professor at Leeds Beckett University, said he had "never heard of anything like this, to be brutally honest," and called it "completely bonkers". He said that it was likely popular due to a constraining of hobbies as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the extended time it took to complete, and Wild taking the relatively mundane task seriously.