We recently finished watching season 3 of the excellent tv series ‘The Leftovers’. There were a couple of arty shots of phone boxes, set in my home nation of Australia. I like the added satellite dish on top of the phone in the second photo.
Tag Archives: rural
Quebec City, Canada
Old City
On the road
Box marks the spot
BT installed its 100,000th payphone at Dunsop Bridge, Lancashire in 1992 and included a plaque to explain its significance. It reads:
“You are calling from the BT payphone that marks the centre of Great Britain.”
In fact, the phone is 4.2 miles (6.8 km) from the true centre. Postmaster and shop owner Phil Woodhead said the town did not capitalise on its status.
“There is only that payphone really… we haven’t put up big signs or anything like that. If this was a bigger town with more shops, then maybe we would do something. But because we are so small, there is really no-one to push it.”
Climate effects
There has recently been much flooding across areas of the UK. Here is a photo relevant to this blog:
Cyprus
We just spent a couple of weeks in Cyprus and came across these phones. In Nicosia I was giving up on seeing a phone in the Old City but just outside the walls, by the Museum entrance there was a very special one – solar powered (see below):
Lempa – by the house with the trippy ceramic walls
Nicosia
Nicosia
Nicosia solar phone
Paphos
Paphos marina
Troodos
Cyprus village
Larnaca
Tilbury Fort, Essex
We visited Tilbury Fort this afternoon, located across from Gravesend on the other side of the Thames. It’s described as one of the finest surviving 17th century forts in England. There is a small museum display in the Officers’ barracks which includes a phone set from WWII (I think)…
Updating Eastern Europe
Here are some oldies that hadn’t made it onto the site yet. (Suzette stars in Budapest and it’s me in the middle box in Krakow.)
Hungary, Budapest (1997?)
Poland, Krakow (1997?)
Slovenia, Ljubljana
Slovenia, Stanjel
Post box story
This is a post box story that tickles my fancy so I thought I should share it…
Post box appears on Thames bridge, confuses village and Uri Geller
A red letter box suddenly appears in the middle of a bridge in Berkshire.
Uri Geller and other villagers have been left confused by the sudden arrival of a red letter box in the middle of a bridge.
The box has been placed a metre above the water on a parapet of the bridge, which crosses the River Thames in Berkshire.
People in Sonning-on-Thames said that the box can only be accessed by boat users.
Geller, who has lived in the village for 33 years, told BBC News he had “never seen anything like it”.
“This is a very unusual village. There are many sightings of a child ghost that walks on the bridge,” he commented.
“Maybe it was the ghost of a mischievous little girl? I have never seen anything like this anywhere in the world, it’s a new one on me.”
Royal Mail spokesperson Val Bodden said: “The recent appearance of a post box frontage on the side of the river bridge at Sonning is a mystery to us.
“It is certainly not an operational posting facility and we have no knowledge of how it arrived at this location.”
BY TOM EAMES10/09/2013
TV
All of a sudden I see loads of phone boxes on the small screen. I guess they are still an integral part of the modern world.
Vegas, (2012) S1 E5:
In the flesh, (2013) E3:
Shetland (2013):
Another from ‘Shetland’. I like this because it shows clearly why it is unlikely we will ever see the end of the phone box and landline, at least in some parts of the world.
Phone closures
This appeared in the ‘i’ newspaper yesterday (11 October 2016). Sign of the times:
Which leads nicely onto this:
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Posted in Comment, News
Tagged curiosity, rural, Wales