There's a coffee shop in my town with the bank's name still carved over the door.

There is a building on my high street that used to be a bank. You can tell, because they never sand off the name — it is cut into the stone over the door, above a place that now sells oat-milk flat whites. Good coffee, actually. I go in.

I do not know where the people went. There would have been a manager who knew the regulars, someone on the counter who would have clocked that old Mr Someone had not been in for a fortnight. A back room. A morning routine. All of it folded up on some Tuesday I did not notice — because a branch closing becomes a fact only once, the day the shutters stay down, and never a process you watch happen.

That is the strange thing about a subtraction. Nobody films it. There is no moment. The high street just quietly has one fewer reason to be somewhere people go. Multiply that by nearly seven thousand and you have the last decade of British banking (Which?, June 2026) — but you do not feel it as a number. You feel it as a coffee in your hand, in a room that used to do something else.

I will not tell you to bank in person out of duty; I am not sure I do. Only this: next time you pass a shopfront that has plainly been something before — a bank, a Woolworths, a pub — let yourself see the ghost of it for a second. Not to mourn it. Just to remember that the thing we call "efficiency" happened to real rooms full of real people, one quiet closure at a time. See it. You do not have to feel anything about it. Just see it.