Region was on course to benefit from £2.5bn of funding between 2000 and 2020 but voted 56% in favour of leaving EU

Newsagent Nick Carey is one of the 182,665 Cornish people who voted to leave the EU even though Brussels has ploughed many millions of pounds into the area where he lives and works.

His arguments are familiar ones: “I want our sovereignty back. I want control. And, yes, I’m worried about immigration. It’s fine to share what we’ve got with others, but let’s make sure we’re OK first. Since the result and all the fuss, I must admit I’ve got a bit worried the economy may suffer, but we’ll get through – the British stiff upper lip and all that.”

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The Cornish result was stark. Seventy-seven per cent of the county’s population turned out, of whom 56.5% opted for Brexit.

According to figures from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), the region was on course by 2020 to have benefited from a total of £2.5bn of funding – EU cash matched with public and private investment – since the turn of the century.

Headline projects completed with EU backing have included a £132m scheme to bring super-fast broadband to the far south-west, three innovation centres, rail line improvements and the development of a glitzy university campus at Penryn, near Falmouth.

It wasn’t going to end there. Between now and 2020, key projects supported by EU funding were set to include exciting work around aerospace – with Newquay touted as a possible site for the proposed spaceport announced in the Queen’s speech – and in geothermal energy.

Carey, 57, is from St Austell, China clay country. The industry once employed thousands and created the “Cornish Alps” – the ghostly mounds of waste that rise high above the town.

Like fishing, farming and tin-mining, the China clay business has declined sharply, leaving the area among the poorest in Europe and thus attracting bundles of EU cash, including a good chunk that was used to create the Eden Project, whose great biomes were built in a disused clay pit near St Austell.

“They talk about all this EU cash. But I don’t see that it has made any difference. It’s just about impossible to get a good job here,” Carey said.

In St Austell, the EU flag is still fluttering alongside Cornish and union ones outside the grand old White Hart hotel. The hotel’s owner, Ameena Williams, voted to remain and was very disappointed at the result. “We have a lot of foreign visitors here. This is going to put them off. They won’t feel welcome now,” she said. “It’s the older people who have voted out. They think we can go back to the days of Churchill and tea on the lawn. Those days have gone.”

Her granddaughter Ashleigh Beard, 18, is beginning a course in interior design at Falmouth in the autumn. She was upset that her chances of working abroad may be diminished. “Europe suddenly feels cut off,” she said.

Young people such as 18-year-old Luca Cowlard are struggling to find a job here. “There’s not a lot of work available around.” He did not vote. “It didn’t seem important at the time. It does now and I wish it had. I’d have voted to stay.”

Over at the Polish delicatessen, Bozena Bzdak, who arrived in St Austell with her husband, Mark, eight years ago, sees an uncertain future. “I want to stay here. We like it here,” she said. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to stay now. We feel sad that people have voted this way.”

On a rainy Sunday the tourists who had found their way to St Austell were looking for diversions from the drizzle. Tourism, a key plank of the region’s economy, may gain from Brexit: a weak pound could encourage more British people to stay in the UK for their holidays and tempt more foreigners to visit. “We’re just not sure at the moment,” said Malcolm Bell, chief executive of Visit Cornwall. “If the pound plummets, British people might come here. But if it stays low, if mortgages go up, if there’s worry over jobs, then it could damage the industry.”

In the hours that followed the referendum result, Cornwall council and the local enterprise partnership (LEP) sought reassurances that they would not lose their funding and were mocked on social media, where critics claimed they had voted out and then asked if they could keep the EU cash anyway.

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Sandra Rothwell, chief executive of the LEP, told the Guardian it wasn’t like that. “Cornwall was one of those places with a high percentage for leave and we’re not asking Europe if we can keep the money anyway. Our focus is on getting a message to national government: We have a clearly evidenced economic need, we have very clear plans of what we want to do. We have been delivering that plan on the basis of investment up to 2020. That plan needs to continue.”

Rothwell has asked for assurances about how Cornwall will continue to be funded, both up to the point where the UK leaves the EU and in the years after that. “There has been no clarification yet,” she said.

The grand bard of Cornwall, “Dr Folk” Merv Davey, said he was devastated by the result and did not buy the argument that the Westminster government would make sure Cornwall did not lose out. “They have never been bothered about Cornwall,” he said. And it was not just about money. “Cornwall has got very strong cultural links with Europe, especially Brittany. Suddenly we’re not European any more and that horrifies me,” said Davey.

Of course, there are many who are delighted at the result. People such as Dave Stevens, who has fished down the coast out of Newlyn for 26 years, Stevens was a vocal supporter of Fishing for Leave, and is thrilled at the result.

“Everyone in Newlyn I have spoken to says they have felt a weight lift off their shoulders. We have the opportunity to go and make a better job of it, to make a real success of fishing now. It’s an exciting time.”