It seems with every development someone, somewhere in Kent, loses a bit of their own personal heritage. And, soon, it will be my turn. Again.

This week it was announced that Ashford’s Park Mall and the ugly Edinburgh Road car park, which sits behind it, is to be flattened.

And lying somewhere within the resulting rubble will be some key elements of my youth.

Because, in the late 1980s, it was in the Sainsbury’s supermarket, sat beneath the concrete carbuncle of a car park, I got my very first job.

On a Saturday from 1pm to 9pm and a few hours on a Thursday night, I would don my ghastly brown overalls, attach my clip-on tie and stack the freezer cabinets of the frozen food section.

Thrillingly, I got to go beyond those doors you always see staff wheeling out big pallets of food from. It wasn’t quite the Willy Wonka factory reveal I half-imagined (instead a vast, gloomy area where boxes were piled everywhere and lorries deposited supplies) – but did give you a sense of the scale of goods being shifted.

At 16, getting your first job is a big deal. I can’t remember quite how much I was paid, but it was enough to satisfy my craving for music. They used to pay you for the previous week just before you started a shift…the money, in cash, being handed over in a little plastic bag complete with a payslip. An exhilarating moment.

The cash rarely lasted longer than a couple of days. But it was liberating.

The Sainsbury’s store closed down in 2001 – relocating to a far bigger, fancier store on the outskirts of the town. I’d long since hung up the brown flares.

It turned into a Wilko soon after. My visits to Ashford, and Park Mall have been so few and far between in recent years, I’ve no idea what, if anything, took its place following its demise.

Another building facing the chop will be a former newsagent which – if memory serves me correctly – is pretty much where the KM office in Park Mall now stands.

It was there my school friends and I decided was the place to buy our first experiment in smoking.

For reasons that escape me, we felt little cigars would be a classier alternative to buying 10 Silk Cut.

One of us – and I suspect it was me – was tasked with going in and buying a small box of Café Crème cigars.

The fact cigars drench you with a far stronger stench than ciggies could ever achieve was clearly not in our thinking.

I’m not sure we really enjoyed the experience, but dabbling was something of a rite of passage, wasn’t it? Today, rather than cigars, kids probably buy an Elf Bar vape. Which allow consumption without any pong lingering on your school uniform; no wonder they’re so popular.

But soon these little moments in my past which I could revisit if the mood ever took me, will be confined to the memory banks. And the older you get, the less reliable as a storage mechanism that all becomes.

I support progress – things can’t stay the same. And the last time I was at Park Mall it was a very different experience to that of my youth; vacant shops all over the place.

But a little piece of my past – and no doubt thousands of others – will disappear in a puff of smoke when the place is pulled down.