Country folk have lost pubs, shops, buses and schools in many Sussex villages during the last 20 years.

Now they may lose the local phone box too as demand for calls declines.

Thanks to mobile phones, BT has said it will not build any more phone boxes and surveys of how well used they are often reveals boxes with least demand are in villages.

The trouble with this change, as with so many others affecting villages, is it harms the hard up more than the rich.

Well-off people have their own phones and often a cluster of mobiles.

Poor people are forced to use the local phone box.

It's a bit of an irony that just when BT had started making phone boxes clean and generally in working order, they should start becoming redundant.

Efforts will be made to revamp them as little telecommunications centres but most people won't bother with that when their mobiles will do everything except cook the dinner.

Village life has changed immensely since the start of the last century when they were largely self-contained and based on farming.

Now most country settlements are havens for the rich and retired, often with a small pool of people who carry out the more menial tasks.

The average village in Sussex these days has little more connection with the land than the middle of Brighton.

The typical resident is a city commuter rather than someone who hoes the soil.

Shops have closed as villagers have forsaken them for the town supermarket or out-of-town superstore.

Bus services have withered away as all but the deprived drive.

Churches have closed or become monthly staging posts for remnants of religion as most people have given up God to worship Mammon.

Some villages such as Amberley have managed to keep more or less all their amenities - why, the place even has its own castle and railway station.

But there are others where there is not a great deal left.

It can be pretty lonely in a little village when you've not got much money and there's no shop or bus.

There is good community spirit, especially in some of the large villages like Henfield and Steyning.

But they are in danger of having their character changed forever by suburban swathes of new homes and already, from some aspects, they are indistinguishable from the outer reaches of Worthing or Shoreham not many miles away.

Not all change is for the worse.

I met a man from Fulking the other day and asked him where he shopped, suspecting he might say it was many miles away at Henfield or Hurstpierpoint.

In fact he goes to the garage at Pyecombe and increasingly petrol filling stations are replacing post offices and churches as the centre of communities.

Villagers gas over gasoline rather than pray in the pews or prattle over the parcels.

And it wouldn't be a bad thing if the old Georgian-style phone boxes were demolished as they are ludicrously out of keeping with thatched cottages.

It might be worth considering some sort of shelter as a replacement local meeting place, even if it has to be attached to the local garage.

After all, I passed a village box the other day where someone with a mobile phone had gone to make a call and keep out of the rain.