Don't click away the heart of our town centre forever

Not least for the members of staff at the local TJ Hughes store who will understandably be concerned about potential job losses and how they will pay their bills.

The latest blow to the town centre is just one in a long line of high street casualties that have fallen by the wayside.

When I was a kid growing up in Chesterfield, it seemed impossible to imagine the town without shops like Woolworths. Or The Co-op Department store. Or Hudson’s.

Yet they have all gone.

There’s a sense of inevitability about these store closures, as one by one the lights go out and the plate glass windows are whitewashed.

Certainly you can’t turn back the clock or refill now-empty stores just by wishing it to be so.

People’s shopping habits have changed, with more of us shopping on-line.

But there’s a danger that we may be clicking away the heart of our town centre forever, with every internet purchase we make.

Supporting your local shops takes a bit of extra time and effort – but it’s well worth it.

That’s why we’ve been running our Love Your High Street campaign – encouraging as many people as possible to support the shopkeepers and traders in Chesterfield’s town centre.

It always annoyed me when I heard people coming back from holiday in, say, France, raving about how lovely it was to get fresh bread from the village boulangerie or the amazing range of cheeses they found on sale in a particular market.

You can find all these things right here in your own home town and so much more.

There are many reasons why businesses shut up shop. TJ Hughes is obviously part of a bigger national chain, and has been facing different pressures.

But there is a really easy way to help our other shops – particularly the small, independent ones we value so much for given the town its unique character – and that is to use them.

If everyone in the town made a concerted effort to make sure they went out of their way to buy something from these businesses, it would make a huge difference.