It is nice to see someone taking a positive and proactive stance - as indeed have the proprietors of Barrett's Beads and Crafts by moving into Bridge Street in Wick.

However, these are two small businesses which are essentially family-run concerns - and therein lies the secret of keeping town centres alive and thriving. The personality of the proprietor together with the support and dedication of an understanding family are at the heart of running a successful small business.

However, take a walk along Bridge Street and you will see bookmakers and charity shops, and a number of empty premises.

A property developer who specialises in building retail parks told me that these are the markers of poverty - and tend to put off larger chain stores from opening up in a town.

The huge building that once housed Woolworths would appear to be a natural home for a Marks and Spencer food-only store or a branch of Next - but neither will take up the tenancy if they think they will be surrounded by boarded-up buildings within months.

Consider the established small businesses in Bridge Street - some with a long and successful record of serving the town: Cormack the jeweller; Gunn's shoe shop and Macallan's paint shop.

Their passing trade is at risk with this downgrading of the one road that everyone drives past on the rat run from Homebase to Tesco.

From personal experience I know the hard work and dedication that goes into building a small business. My father, Ernest Adams, started his linen shop in 1981 and ran it - working seven days a week, never taking a holiday - until his health gave in at the age of 75 in 2007.

Along with his right-hand girl, Mary Ross, the shop had a wide following (I saw Baroness Williams in the bank with a clutch of Fairways bags on several occasions) and the locals relied on my father to find everything they wanted from net curtains to goose-down duvets.

Tesco and Argos did affect his trade - but he limped on until illness confined him to barracks - and then as an unpaid administrator it was down to me to try to keep the business running until our assistants retired. We did our level best but essentially my father was the business and, without him being there, we had to concede defeat. We gave the "cave" at the back of the shop to Sam next door and offered the lease of the smaller premises to Rosemount Textiles (which, incidentally, does a roaring trade in Orkney and in Ellon). However, after six months it concluded that it was doing no more than breaking even, and resigned its tenancy. The company put this down to a combination of factors - among them the influence of the retail park. My father concluded that the best way forward for us would be to lease the shop and, thankfully, Made in Caithness took up the tenancy shortly before Christmas last year.

However, we need to also acknowledge that Caithness has gone through a considerable demographic change over the past few years. There are incomers who have no loyalty to some of the small businesses that make up Wick and Thurso. I overheard one such group running down the old established businesses in a café one day, and asked them where they shopped.

I fully expected to be told to mind my own business but they fell over their feet to tell me about a number of websites where they could find anything on our High Street. They didn't take on board that they couldn't try on shoes, couldn't return a cushion cover if the zip didn't work and had to pay postage costs - which meant they were actually paying more for their goods.

So what might prove the way forward? Too many of those boarded-up shops are in the hands of estate agents who don't know the town and ask for much more rent than is viable. The average rental for property in Wick is £10 per square metre per month but one of the empty premises is asking three times that sum.

If a shop has been on the market unoccupied for a long period, perhaps the estate agent should offer it at a reduced rent to people with a good business idea. One option is the franchise system - the Body Shop springs to mind. In the case of larger premises, why not get some of the big retailers which would have taken up slots in the retail park beside Tesco, the one that wasn't built?

Above all, try to do a bit of positive thinking. If we all take the gloom and doom approach we'll be left with no town centre at all and that would be a real shame.

Julie M.P. Adams, 2 Swanson Drive, Wick.

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