
Category Archives: News
The phone box continues to inspire

From Dezeen: workplace furniture company Room has created a single-person acoustic pod that provides solo workspaces in open-plan offices. The first product designed in Room’s catalogue, The Phone Booth is characterised by its trio of sound-dampening material layers that work together to reduce noise by 30 decibels, according to the brand.
The booth is clad in sound-blocking MDF and lined with sound-absorbing PET felt made from recycled plastic bottles. 100 per cent natural wool finishes also help to control noise levels. There is an LED light mounted in the ceiling along with two ultra-quiet fans that keep the air inside clean. Both the light and fans are controlled by a smart sensor.
The booth is delivered flat-packed and can be assembled in an hour by two people using only one tool, and it can also be moved between locations easily once assembled given its flexible design. The Phone Booth comes in two colourways, light and dark, and punctuated with oak accents.
Hull’s cream-coloured phone boxes given Grade II-listed status
More good stuff… Again from The Guardian.
K8 boxes are last in the line of classics, say campaigners as nine still in working order get heritage protection

Nine rare cream-coloured public phone boxes that are still in working order have been given heritage protection by the government.
The K8 phone boxes are all cream – rather than red – because they are in Hull, the only place in England where the local council ran the public telephone network.
On the advice of Historic England, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said it was listing the best surviving nine in Hull and its surroundings at Grade II.
Sarah Charlesworth, the listing team leader for the north at Historic England, said the phone boxes were something from a bygone era.
“Nowadays we have mobile phones, so the need for a phone box has declined, but a lot of people still remember when that was the only option,” she said.
“For many of us they’ve been the scene of memorable moments in our own lives, from furtive conversations with first boyfriends to desperate calls home when we’ve been in a fix.”
Charlesworth said remaining phone boxes today were often mini libraries or pop-up art galleries, so for Hull’s still to be in use was “really quite rare”.
The Twentieth Century Society, a heritage campaign group, welcomed the move. Its director Catherine Croft said: “The K8 is really the last in the line of the classic telephone boxes and their plight has long been a cause for C20 Society, so we’re delighted to see another brace of boxes recognised with national listing.
“They’re the perfect example of how good design – no matter how small – can help enrich our high streets and communities.”
The K8 phone box was designed in 1965-66 by the architect Bruce Martin, who had been commissioned by the General Post Office. They were an easier-to-maintain update to the K2 and K6 boxes designed by Giles Gilbert Scott.
About 11,000 were installed across the UK and most were removed by British Telecom after privatisation in 1984. They were replaced by the widely disliked KX100 kiosk, a more functional and accessible phone box described by one Guardian writer as “utterly bland” and “plain nasty”.
Only about 50 of the K8 boxes still exist, some of them already listed such as examples in Swindon and on the platform of Worcester’s Shrub Hill railway station.
They are now joined by the Hull K8s, which were made cream to mark Hull’s independence from the network. Today, Hull’s network continues to be run by an independent company, KCOM.

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Tagged heritage and history, UK, urban
London Underground phone kiosks given Grade II-listed status
This is the kind of news we like… From The Guardian.

K8s installed on tube stations between 1968 and 1983 are listed for architectural and historic interest.
Four rare phone boxes on London Underground stations have been given Grade II-listed status by the government for their architectural and historic interest.
The phone boxes are among 11,000 K8 kiosks that were installed across the UK between 1968 and 1983. Only about 50 remain, mostly in Hull where they were part of an independent phone network rather than the property of British Telecom.
The K8s on tube stations were owned by London Underground and housed an internal phone system for station staff. As such, they were painted different colours to the traditional red phone boxes.
The newly listed boxes are at High Street Kensington and Chorleywood, both blue; Chalfont and Latimer, maroon; and Northwick Park, which is white.
Tom Foxall of Historic England, the body that recommends listing to the government, said: “There are very few designs that can be genuinely termed as ‘iconic’ but the K8 is certainly one of them. Like its predecessors, this kiosk was a defining feature of 20th-century Britain’s physical, technological and cultural landscape. Very few K8s survive, so they certainly need to be cherished and protected.”
The K8 was commissioned by the General Post Office, which owned the public phone network in the mid-60s, and designed by the architect Bruce Martin. Unlike the classic dome-topped K2 and K6 boxes, designed in the 1920s by Giles Gilbert Scott, which have architrave moulding and glass panelling, the K8 is minimalist with a flat roof and single large windows.
Most of the 11,000 K8s were removed by British Telecom after it was privatised in 1984. They were succeeded by the aluminium-framed KX100, most of which have since been ripped out with the inexorable rise of mobile phones.
The four tube station K8s join nine K8s in Hull that were listed earlier this year, giving a total of 23 on the national heritage list for England.
Historic England has appealed to phone box enthusiasts to help the search for unrecorded K8s.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, the arts and heritage minister, said: “This distinctive telephone box design, once a ubiquitous part of daily life in the UK, is now rare to see in our public spaces. I am delighted these remaining examples have been listed so that their design can continue to be admired and enjoyed for years to come.”
By 2021, about 21,000 working public phone boxes remained in Britain, from a peak in the mid-90s of about 100,000. More than 6,000 have been converted to other uses, such as community libraries or to house public defibrillators. 96% of UK adults own a mobile phone.

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Tagged heritage and history, UK, urban
Tiny places
The Guardian has published an uplifting piece about tiny places and I’m glad to see a phone box has made the list. Click here for the full article.
Warley Museum, West Yorkshire

When the local community association opened up the floor to buying and converting a Warley telephone box in 2016, artists Paul Czainski, 69, and his wife Chris (pictured) suggested turning it into a museum. “Once we’d put our hands up, it was our responsibility,” says Paul, who has turned the back wall into a local history display, made a mosaic floor of broken bits dug up from allotments and etched famous Yorkshire images into its glass panels. Displays change every three months and have included “the world’s smallest art exhibition” – teeny works by 40 artists – and collections of beer bottle tops and fossils.
It’s free to enter and accommodates two at a time, though displays are visible from outside. Upkeep is a cinch as Paul and Chris live across the road. “The charm is people can walk past without realising, then be drawn back for a closer look. We love to see their reactions. It’s only little, but it’s very important.”
New York City removes the last payphone from service
I have just read some saddening news. Not sad on the grand scale of what’s happening in the world at the moment but sad in that it brings to an end a long tradition in which I have an interesst. The following is cross-post from the CNBC website on 23rd May 2022:
It’s the end of an era: New York City removed its last public payphone on Monday.
The boxy enclosures were once an iconic symbol across the city. But the rise of cellphones made the booths obsolete.
The effort to replace public pay telephones across the city kicked off in 2014 when the de Blasio administration solicited proposals to reimagine the offering, the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation said in a news release.
Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks.
There are nearly 2,000 kiosks across the city, according to a map from LinkNYC.
“Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the airplane, the digital evolution has progressed from payphones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs,” Commissioner Matthew Fraser said in the release.
The last public pay telephone will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York as part of an exhibit looking back at life in the city before computers.
Phone box design keeps on inspiring
Furniture brand Kettal has designed a series of booths, called Phonebooth, that can be inserted into office interiors to create a sense of privacy in busy working environments.
For more details go to https://www.dezeen.com/2022/03/25/phonebooth-meeting-pods-kettal-showroom/