Charlotte Brontë spent an unhappy few months in 1839 on the outskirts of Skipton in North Yorkshire, as governess to the unruly children of John Sidgwick, a wealthy cotton mill owner in the town.

Charlotte wrote to her sister Emily that she found the countryside, which is close by the Yorkshire Dales, to be “divine”. But the scenery did not make up for the misbehaviour of the Sidgwick children, whom she found to be “riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs”. Charlotte did not keep her job long, but she would have seen Skipton as it entered its Victorian heyday, with the chimneys of mills sprouting everywhere, a busy canal linking the town to Liverpool and Leeds, and a big sheep and cattle market in the town centre.

Nearly two hundred years after Charlotte was in Skipton, the mills are gone, demolished or converted to other uses, with only one chimney still standing. But the market in the broad high street in the town centre still takes place four days a week, though the cattle and sheep part has moved to a big facility on the edge of town, while the barges on the canal cater for tourists instead of transporting raw cotton, coal and stone from the quarries. As for everyday life, a survey by the property website Rightmove found Skipton to be “the happiest place” to live in the UK, though as Charlotte Brontë knew all too well, happiness is very much a matter of personal circumstance.

Skipton, which has a population of 15,500, shares many of the advantages and failings of the 1,000 towns in Britain with populations under 60,000, such as Lewes in East Sussex or Canterbury in Kent. They are often attractive places in which to live, but they all struggle against their high streets being hollowed out and reduced to retail deserts as shoppers abandon them for out-of-town supermarkets and online shopping. High rents and business rates squeeze out independent businesses, while the branches of famous high-street stores and banks close, replaced by a depressing mix of estate agents, charity shops, vape shops and nail bars, interspersed with boarded-up shop fronts. Soaring house prices and rents force out the children of local residents who can no longer afford to buy a place to live near their parents.

More is at stake here than commercial success or failure, because people see their local high street as the geographic and social heart of their community, which, once lost, leads to the disintegration of their communal identity. An Ipsos poll last year found that 79 per cent of the public list high-street decline as one of their two most important concerns, only just behind rising prices (84 per cent). Some 54 per cent visit their local high street or shopping area once a week, but they complain of too many vape, barber and charity shops, and a lack of independent stores offering a wide variety of goods. For many, the poor state of their local high street is visible and depressing evidence of national decline.

Some towns are fighting back more successfully than others, suggesting that high-street decline is not inevitable. Skipton has more going for it than many other towns in terms of local wealth and employment, but I got the impression during a visit that it has taken better advantage of its opportunities than elsewhere.

“There is a greater sense of communal solidarity here which makes it easier to organise things than in other towns,” says Skipton’s mayor, Winston Feather, comparing it to Dover and Canterbury where he once lived. Born in North Yorkshire, a........

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