No but go to places like Barrow in Furness, Wigton and other largish towns in Cumbria. The major industry there supported the town, but like all things at the moment are in decline. Closer to home there is Moss Side Manchester, Toxteth Liverpool and many more. I feel sorry for the folk in Gillingham but please don't go calling it a deprived area.
rant over
I'm sorry Ian, but I know the Cumbrian towns you mention very well (I am originally from Lancashire, had a business in Preston in the 1980s and have worked at Sellafield and travelled all over Cumbria) and I still don't hesitate to call Gillingham deprived.
West Cumbria and the Medway towns (including Gillingham) shared EU Objective 1 status, which means that they were among the poorest parts of the whole 15-state European Union - before the recent enlargement to include the likes of Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states.
There are far more similarities between the Medway towns and west Cumbria than you might think. Their economies were all based on sunset industries and prosperity rose and fell with the fortunes of those industries. In both cases, those industries have largely gone and the social and economic problems left behind are massive.
Like many northerners I used to believe that the south of England was universally prosperous. But I travelled extensively in my job and I have to say that I was shocked to find pockets of grinding poverty in the south that I would have expected only to find in the north.
Did you know that one of the poorest boroughs in the whole of the UK is Tower Hamlets, which is where Canary Wharf is sited? Its poverty is rated as bad as Humberside and East Yorkshire.
The economy of Kent used to be based around the sunset industries of coal mining, ship building and ship repairing. These are hardly the industries I expected to find in leafy and prosperous Kent!
I have several friends who live in Kent, and I have travelled all over the county with them. There are great contrasts between affluent commuter villages and socially deprived crime hotspots such as the Medway towns, Hastings, Dover, Ramsgate and Margate, all of which have exactly the same social problems as in west Cumbria plus the Durham coalfield, south Yorkshire, Humberside, Tameside, Merseyside, the Potteries, the Black Country (in the West Midlands around Wolverhampton) and for exactly the same reasons - their major industries closed down.
It is easy if you live in the north (and don't travel extensively) to believe that deprivation only occurs in the north, and that there is a simple north/south divide. Well, it is a lot more complicated than that.
Let me tell you that Harrogate, Chester, Alderley Edge/Wilmslow and Kendal are all far more like prosperous southern towns than northern, with house prices to match. If you want to see poverty, high crime, urban squalor and the results of drug dependency you are just as likely to find it in Luton, Hatfield, Portsmouth, Aldershot, much of inner city London and the other places I mentioned above as in any of the many areas of the north that have been devastated by the demise of traditional industries.
I hope that explains why I described Gillingham as deprived. I am confident that the description is accurate, as I regularly visit the Medway towns on business. Ask anyone who knows Gillingham, Strood, Chatham, Rochester and Maidstone (a garrison town) and they will tell you what these places are like. To me, they compare surprisingly closely with Barrow (my maternal grandmother was born and brought up on Walney Island), Millom, Whitehaven and Workington and share much the same problems.
I must confess that all of your posts gives me the impression of being wrote by an accountant\economist. 
Usually when a branch closes the staff might be offered jobs elsewhere, but is that a legal thing that might make the bosses feel better? Will they pay travelling expenses? Will the employee keep the same salary? Is there a need to duplicate jobs? I would imagine the answers will be; No, no and no in that order, or any combination of the above. 
thought are with the employes and their familys 
