I’ve developed a slovenly habit when visiting some of Scotland’s pre-loved seaside towns. It’s triggered when you pass the first barren space where a local shop had once been. Soon you become mesmerised by these boarded-up husks and fall to counting them.

You imagine what these places might once have looked like. The buildings which housed these shops are still rather grand, of course, for they were built at a time when civic pride stood for something and when men who had been successful in business wanted to bequeath something to their local towns Then, if you look hard enough you’ll soon encounter the supermarket behemoths (they usually hunt in twos) lurking beyond the town’s main drag, sucking the retail profits that once sustained the old High Streets. In their wake come the scavengers and bottom-feeders: the vaping shops, the tanning salons, the fast food emporiums and the amusement arcades.

In Saltcoats, Sainsbury’s and Lidl lie at either end of the town centre, between them creating a vacuum that slowly picks off the local retailers one by one. I’ve seen this phenomenon all over Scotland and in the north-west and north-east of England when the old industries which had once fed and watered these places moved out.

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Enterprise zones would then be created by national and local governments and talk of future-proofing and sustainable jobs and retraining workforces and ‘resilience’. Often, the enterprise zones merely assisted global corporations to maximise a few low-tax, minimum-wage years of profit before high-tailing it, taking the jobs with them.

Saltcoats lies within North Ayrshire’s ‘Three Towns’ area that also includes Ardrossan and Stevenston. They all sit, side-by-side along the eastern shore of the Firth........

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