When you visit St Agnes, a small village along the north Cornish coast, it feels a bit like stepping into a TV show your nan loves.

The 500m-long high street starts at the top of Vicarage Road and is largely one-way: beginning with the Cornish Pizza Company, it winds past the community-focused Mechanics and Miners’ Institute (MMI), independent antique dealers, restaurants and a brewery. Then the road takes a vertiginous dip into the heart of the village where you’ll find an independent butcher, an award-winning bakery, a fish and chip shop, a homewares outlet, an independent jewellers and Churchtown Stores, which sells local produce.

Then, either head down a steep hill where you’ll find more pubs and a surf shop, or turn off down Stippy Stappy (real name) to reach the coast. It’s the kind of place where the roads are so narrow you need to step into doorways when the bus comes past, the butcher closes every day for lunch, and you can’t walk 10 paces without stopping for a chat.

But I am not here to escape the city and embrace a slower life. Instead, I’m visiting on this bright November morning to learn about the village’s battle to keep their only cashpoint open.

Disappearing banking is a problem that’s affecting communities across the country. As businesses increasingly digitise their payments systems (only eight per cent of payments in 2025 were made with cash, according to UK Finance’s UK Payment Markets Report), banks and hole-in-the-walls are vanishing from our high streets.

In fact, according to 2026 research from LINK, the UK’s main interbank cash machine network, thousands of ATMs (automated teller machines) are closing every year. In 2025, there were five per cent fewer cash machines than in 2024 – 42,403 compared to 44,569. Of these, 33,710 were free to use. The number of ATMs in the UK peaked in 2015, with 70,588 machines. So over the past decade, there has been something akin to a 40 per cent decline.

While that might not pose a problem if you live in an urban area where there’s historically been a choice of cashpoints, if you live in a rural village where there’s only ever been one banking outlet, the disappearance of ATMs is a much bigger deal. “Cashpoint deserts” have been a topic of public debate for the past decade, and the residents of St Agnes fear they may soon be living in one.

St Agnes cashpoint is one of 132 ATMs Barclays announced it was planning to remove in September. The residents and council only learned of this decision when a message appeared on the cashpoint’s screen, stating it would cease operating on 11th December.

While Barclays made the decision, it said LINK had approved it. Over email, a Barclays spokesperson said: “Any changes to our ATM network are independently assessed by LINK under the UK’s Access to Cash framework to ensure local communities continue to have access to cash.”

This framework assesses whether there are cash access facilities within a three-mile radius of the “vast majority” of rural residents. These facilities must be able to manage demand and be reached in a reasonable time or cost. LINK said in a statement that “following the announced closure of the cash machine in St Agnes, our initial assessment recommended no further services due to the role of the Post Office”.

But the residents found their assessment, in the most polite terms, wanting.

A community fight

I meet Cornwall Council Member Pete Mitchell, together with fellow campaigner Marie* outside the St. Agnes Hotel. They tell me that that the removal of the machine would be a “disaster”.

The closest cashpoint alternatives within three miles are all Post Offices with unreliable hours, while the nearest free-to-use, 24/7 cashpoint may be within three miles as the crow flies, it’s actually nearly four miles away by road. For residents who rely on public transport, “a return journey simply to obtain cash can take approximately 1 hour 25 minutes to Perranporth and around 1 hour 52 minutes to some of the other alternative locations”. The local bus is scheduled to run once an hour and is unreliable; a taxi would cost about £20 a journey.

This is not the first time St Agnes’s residents have fought against changes they see as harmful to the community: earlier this year, they strongly opposed a proposed Co-op supermarket, worrying about its negative impact on the high street. And back in 2015, the council, together with local campaigners and Vince Cable MP, then Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, fought tooth and nail to keep the village’s Barclays bank branch open.

Ironically, the cashpoint was the compromise for the bank closure. “The man from Barclays who was behind the bank closure had told us that the hole-in-the-wall was our legacy, and I had it in writing,” Pete tells me. “But when I brought this up now, he said, ‘Yeah, but legacy doesn’t last forever.'”

A LINK representative is travelling to St Agnes shortly to assess the local facilities before making a final decision. Pete doesn’t have high hopes: in 2015, Vince Cable told him, “Good luck, but once Barclays say they’re shutting something, they’ll do it”. But that doesn’t mean the community will take it lying down. They are planning a mock funeral for the ATM in January to tie in with the other Barclays closures.

Post Office can’t meet demand

LINK has approved the closing of the ATM because of what it calls a “viable alternative” – that is the Post Office, which in reality is a kiosk in the Costcutter. But as Marie puts it “it’s not really fit for purpose – and the Post Office themselves will admit that”.

Matt, the Post Office manager, confirms this. Though the kiosk is meant to be open from 8.30am to 4.45pm, he tells me they struggle to do so consistently. “We’re short-staffed as it is and I’ve just been told by my area manager that I’m potentially going to have my labour budget cut. We’re just not going to have the manpower to keep up with the demand.”

Staff got a window into their post-ATM world a few weeks earlier when the cashpoint stopped working and everyone piled into the Post Office. “I’m only allowed to hold a certain amount of money in the Post Office and, at the moment, it’s not enough to sustain us. I did about £5-6,000 worth of cash withdrawals by 2pm.” It takes a full week for the next cash delivery to make it to the village.

Residents are united in their concern for their most vulnerable: the disabled, the elderly, the people with mobility issues and anyone who struggles with a more digitised world. An estimated 25 per cent of the UK population are over 65, who are far more likely to be digitally excluded according to a House of Commons research briefing.

Outside the Costcutter-cum-Post Office, I meet Vince, a 71-year-old retiree who regularly gets cash out for his elderly neighbours. “They catch me on my way up to the village and ask if I can pick them up some money. Joan has £200 every other week, Joy has £100 a week. It’s how they pay for everything.” Without the cashpoint, he says he’ll have to make less frequent trips and take out more at a time, but this will further squeeze them as they wait for their weekly pension.

But even for residents where access isn’t an issue, it will be a major obstacle. Sam, a 59-year-old associate lecturer at the Open University laments that “the banking here is non-existent: we have to go into Truro to do any banking and it’s majorly inconvenient, especially if you’re working. It could take three hours out of your day”.

Carr Butchers, a family run business of over 50 years, may well be most negatively affected: they are a cash-only business. Other high street shops don’t rely on cash, but still take in significant amounts: at Churchtown Wholefoods, they estimate up to a quarter of their takings are cash. And come summer’s tourist season, businesses are inundated: Adam Vasey, the owner of Institute, the cafe in the MMI, says he took in 20 per cent cash over the summer, while Lou, landlady at the pub the Driftwood Spars, says they always get people coming in looking for cash in high season.

Card usage also puts small traders at an inherent disadvantage: one electrician has eschewed getting a SumUp machine because it takes a percentage each transaction, while Jade at the Peterville Arms points out she loses 20 per cent when she’s tipped on card.

Another glaring problem is that the move to digital assumes that power will always be reliable. Anne at Churchtown Arts, the homeware store, had an internet outage for three weeks earlier this year and would have lost thousands if cash hadn’t been readily available for customers. Down at the Driftwood Spars, Lou says: “We had three power cuts last year – I’m talking about getting a generator just so we can still operate.”

But these fears are not just economic – they’re existential.

A human right to access money

I head up to the MMI, which has been a pillar of the community in some form since the late 1800s. It is now a hub supporting everyone from new parents to older people struggling with their memory. Hillary, the chair of the board of trustees at the MMI moved to St Agnes five years ago when she was in her early thirties. She says that the loss of the cashpoint “would have a huge impact in terms of the cash that comes through the building but also the [more isolated] types of people that use the building. Knowing how they go about their lives, it will further isolate them and it would be a really big loss”.

Later, I meet Jenny Moore, 83, who is on the committee for the local Women’s Institute. She believes the lack of ATM will impact local charity work. “It’ll destroy the feeling of the village. We have all these small events going on [that will struggle to fundraise as people won’t have ready cash]. It’s so short-sighted. If they [the Government] want to nurture rural or coastal communities, then they’re not looking at what supports that little community.”

There’s this idea that rural life is backward, and that these kinds of changes are necessary to draw reluctant people into the 21st century. But St Agnes is already a modern village. In the evening, windows are lit up by the glow of digital TVs, you can find gluten-free and vegan options everywhere, and the majority of trade cashless. But it’s also a place that’s worked hard to hold onto the traditions that have been lost elsewhere: independent local businesses, friendliness, a genuine sense of community.

“We’re slowly losing all the little things that make the village the village, and we want to hold on to as many of those as we can,” says Adam at Institute. Vince agrees, adding: “It’s a human right to be able to access money. It shouldn’t be a big ask for a multinational bank that has used our money to make its profits to keep a promise.”