I’ve been watching season 1 of the tv series Anne Rice’s ‘Talamasca‘ and the iconic red UK phone box plays a big role as part of the drop box system:
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Telephones of the World
I picked up this volume recently and this creation is very appealing – caffeine and dial:
Out and about
I haven’t come across many phone boxes lately so just two locations this time.
I spent a few days in Helsinki and Tallinn and this was the only phone box I came across. Both countries are strongly digitial orientated so that may explain it. This UNESCO island is a sea fort and the phone box was last used in the 1970s (I think).
This is me, with my dog Biscuit, at the Rochester Sweeps Festival a few weeks ago.
A bit of variety
Some more tv scenes
You can rely on an Agatha Christie production to have a telephone scene.
Yes, it’s wrong to vandalise a phone box but…
I found an short folk horror film from 1978 on You Tube called ‘Tarry Dan Tarry Dan’ (Scarey Old Spooky Man). It focuses on a small group of mid-teen boys who at one point are discussing the elderly tramp who is well know in the village. At 29 minutes in, they say the following, with the second boy making fun of the first…
“There’s something evil about that old guy. I can feel it. Sense it somehow”
“Yeah, yeah, he vandalises phone boxes didn’t you know”
The 1970s was definately a more innocent time…in some ways. The story is really quite disturbing and I doubt it would be seen fit for children these days.
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Posted in Media
Tagged curiosity, television, UK
Honest Images
I am a member of the FB group Honest Images. Sheila offered me her image and the other is from Emer Wiseman.
A man after my own heart
What happened next: the man who saved the last phone box in his village
Emine Saner, The Guardian, Tue 30 Dec 2025
When BT earmarked the kiosk for closure in January, Derek Harris began to campaign. The fight gave him purpose at a difficult time in his life
- ‘I don’t want it to die’: one man’s battle to save the last phone box in his village
The caller display flashes up: “Derek in the K6” it reads. On the line is Derek Harris, ringing from the red phone box he saved for his village. When he saw, on the agenda for the parish council meeting, that BT had earmarked it for closure, Harris knew he had to fight it. “It’s fighting for what is valuable, cherished,” he told me when I went to meet him in February, sitting over coffee in a cafe near Sharrington, the Norfolk village that has been his home for more than 50 years, and the phone box for longer. It’s a K6, for Kiosk No 6, designed in 1935 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
For a few weeks, Harris, then 89, became a media star. One of the criteria for keeping a phone box in use is that at least 52 calls have to be made from it in a year (fewer than 10 had been made in 2024). As the campaign picked up speed, one day a queue of people made more than 230 calls from the K6. Harris sparked a national conversation about the continuing need for kiosks in an age of mobiles. Behind the scenes, he was a tenacious activist, sending constant emails to his MP, councillors, and of course, BT. Some of them included photographs he had taken of BT vans whose engineers were working nearby, as proof the phone box could be easily maintained. In March, BT decided to reverse its decision.
For the full article please go to the Guardian:
Blog on
I love the little solar panel on this box in Whitstable (hard to see in the photo though).
Images taken by me watching tv:
Lerwick news
I was listening to a Mark Steel’s In Town podcast and this news item was mentioned:
Person freed from Lerwick phone box by firefighters
from Shetland News 1 July 2025
A LERWICK phone box had to be cut by firefighters after a report of a person becoming trapped on Monday night.
For the full article please go to the Shetland News – https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2025/07/01/person-freed-lerwick-phone-box/