Letter to the Editor | ‘The loss of a bank hugely affects the whole community’

Dear Sir,

Eileen Stow’s letter published in Monday’s Macau Daily Times was so wonderfully evocative and descriptively poetic of customers using Coloane Village’s only bank.
It reminded me very much of a similar last-minute attempt to save the Lloyds Bank branch at the top of the very long and vertiginous Fore Street in Totnes, Devon UK. Sadly it did not succeed, and the local community, with a very high proportion of elderly and young families, was expected to use the other Lloyds Bank Branch at the bottom of the very steep hill.
This was many years ago now, and so regrettably villages and small towns in the UK have since suffered the same fate. The loss of a bank – oft times a Post Office as well – hugely affects the whole community, and leaves the vulnerable exposed, isolated and lonely without vital business and social lifelines.

Yours faithfully,
Patricia Thompson