The only thing we needed cash for in England was to drop in the collection buckets of street performers. Everything else, tap a card or tap your phone with Apple Pay (or Google Pay). Lots of places wouldn’t even accept cash. No minimum, nobody complaining if you tapped for something that only cost a pound or two. Oh wait. Toilets. The public toilets in the middle of town that were not at a public facility like a train station or Underground, cost 20 pence. Shortly after we discovered that there was a charge for random restrooms and we had to have a few coins in our pockets, we discovered that there is a tradition of pubs offering their toilets for free to anyone that needs them. No resistance, just a friendly welcome to anyone wandering in from the street. There is a pub close by in practically every neighborhood.
Restaurants. Food carts on the street. On and off trains, buses, and the Underground. No cash changes hands. No throwing money at the turnstile. No handing cash to an attendant. Tap at the turnstile on your way into the underground, tap on your way out, and it figures out how much to charge you. Train tickets away from London you have to buy a ticket, but you can do that on your phone with a click. It’s like boarding passes at the airport, just show the ticket on your phone to the attendant and you’re good to go.
No converting dollars to pounds when we arrived. No scrambling to try to get leftover pounds converted back to dollars before we left. For such an old country, they sure are modern with their payment systems.