John Guillaumier paints a vivid and beautiful picture of ‘shops gone past’ in his article ‘The decline of community’ (April 1). However, he equates the slump of the high street with isolationism, which is surely a mistake.

The reasons why so many independent shops and roadside vendors have closed down have more to do with economics and working patterns than a breakdown in the social order.

First, bread, fish and vegetable door-to-door vendors tend to turn up at inconvenient times when everybody is preparing to go to work or has already left.

Second, scale and the price of imports give large and international retail chains a considerable edge over small shops.

Third, doing errands in an air-conditioned shopping centre, which opens till late at night, is more comfortable than traipsing around the village in unbearable weather while trying to stick to the idiosyncratic schedules of mom-and-pop shopkeepers.

Fourth, thanks to online shopping, we can have most goods delivered to our front door at the click of a button.

As for community spirit, it has not so much declined as shifted. People regularly travel far from their hometown to visit the cafés that best suit their tastes, the housewives who used to “gossip while they did their purchases” are now having discussions with their colleagues around the water-cooler and friendships flourish in chat rooms and apps all over the internet.

Poets, painters and writers might always prefer the romance and splash of colour that the quirky shopkeeper and the busy street market bring to the neighbourhood but, as much as we all miss our favourite shops from our childhood, if we truly want to get to grips with modern social phenomena, we need to go beyond wallowing in nostalgia.