Abstract. Within a context of public policy debate in the United Kingdom on social exclusion, health inequalities, and food poverty, the metaphor of the`food desert' caught the imagination of those involved in policy development. Drawing from a major cross-disciplinary investigation of food access and food poverty in British cities, the authors report in this paper findings from the first`before/after' study of food consumption in a highly deprived area of a British city experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food-retail access. The study has been viewed as the first opportunity in the United Kingdom to assess the impact of a non-healthcare intervention (specifically a retail-provision intervention) on food-consumption patterns, and by extension diet-related health, in such a deprived, previously poor-retail-access community. The paper offers evidence of a positive but modest impact of the retail intervention on diet, and the authors discuss the ways in which their findings are potentially significant in the context of policy debate.