Joe Biden’s home town – a quiet mid-Atlantic city of about 70,000 people midway between New York and Washington – like much of America in 2020, is still grinding its way through the endless twilight of this pandemic.

Wilmington’s main drag, Market Street, is a dispiriting experience at the moment. Not because it is without charm. There is plenty of that thanks to some stunning late-Georgian architecture and, at its southern end, a revived waterfront lifestyle zone that has given its raw 19th-century industrial features a facelift.