During the week we took an underground walk along the Mail Rail at Mount Pleasant. No longer in operation, the rail operated for 75 years up to 2003. Here’s a shot of the garden by the shop:
And here are a few from the highly recommended tour:
Posted onMay 2, 2022|Comments Off on The last UK phone boxes
Photo: Tracey O’Brien / Getty
This article has been reposted from The Guardian, by Sophie Elmhirst, 28 Apr 2022.
Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?
by Sophie Elmhirst
There used to be a phone box at the top of my street. It stood in the middle of a traffic island, near a bin, a lamp-post and a bollard. I never questioned the presence of the phone box, just as I never questioned the presence of the bin, the lamp-post or the bollard. Often, when we passed, my daughter and I would play the phone-box game. I had to stand to one side and pretend to call the phone in the phone box, which didn’t work. She would then pretend to answer, before making a series of further calls in a complicated unfolding of phone-related business that involved making plans, changing plans and then ringing everyone she had just spoken to again to tell them she was going to be late.
It was fun, this game, and it became hard to pass the phone box without playing it. The phone box, to her, was the best kind of toy. It was a real object that no longer worked, and therefore had the gravitas of something adults had once used, but could now be deployed to her own imaginative ends. It also had an extra, loopy charm. A giant phone housed in its own little shelter outside in the middle of the street made absolutely no sense. A phone, to her, was a small, shiny rectangle that lived in my coat pocket. This outdoor cubicle with a handset on a cord and fat, squishy buttons was both hilarious and mysterious, as if it had landed from the sky.
Walk round a city, a town, a village and you see them. The last phone boxes. Once you start seeing them, you see them everywhere. For a while, I became preoccupied by their contradictory presence, often standing proudly on a street corner, completely ignored. At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. Now, there are just over 20,000 working boxes left, which still sounds like quite a lot, given it’s hard to imagine anyone actually using one. And yet, they do. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. Five million! It seems impossible. A number so surprisingly large it made me think there must be a lone guy in a box somewhere obsessively making one-minute calls all day to random numbers.
Many of the phone boxes you still see are shells of their former selves: not working, not yet gone. Just there, a remnant of a former time, often used as a bin. Some have been repurposed. Since 2008, when BT launched its adopt-a-kiosk scheme, more than 7,000 phone boxes, mostly the old red ones, have been bought by local communities for £1 each. Now, they house things such as mini libraries, art galleries and plant displays; many contain defibrillators, for ready access in a medical emergency.
Those that remain occupy a particular place in Britain’s idea of itself. On Oxford Street, I passed a tourist shop whose window display included a shelf of miniature red phone boxes sitting alongside its close relations: the doubledecker bus, the black taxi and an old-fashioned post box, all symbolic of a storybook, Enid Blyton-ish Britain. “If you were to do a painting of an English village,” said Nigel Linge, professor of telecommunications at Salford University and probably Britain’s premier phone-box expert, “you’d have a duck pond, a church, a pub and I’d bet you’d have a phone box.” (Linge’s first phone-box memory: calling relatives from the one on his estate in the mining village of Willington, County Durham; his family didn’t get a phone in the house until the 1980s.) “I don’t think any other country is as passionate about their phone boxes as we are about ours,” he added.
To understand this unlikely passion, I started going into every phone box I passed. Typically, there was broken glass, discarded cider cans, an unmistakable smell of piss. Not much to love. One old red box in Camden was a wreck – no door, plastic bottles and browned leaves carpeting the floor, a handwritten note in the glass advertising a hot blonde. I picked up the receiver and heard, unbelievably, the long tone of a line open for calls. An old, old sound. And then, a memory dump from a mid-1990s adolescence. Back then, out with friends, I used phone boxes quite a lot. They were near bus stops, outside tube stations. The odd reverse-charge call in a mishap, begging lifts or forgiveness.
Now, the phone box is an object caught between existence and obsolescence. They seem pointless, and yet they endure, on our streets and in our culture, covered in creepers in the music video for Adele’s song Hello; clambered all over by One Direction for the cover of their 2012 album Take Me Home; being stroked by Molly-Mae Hague, in beige shorts and waistcoat, for a recent Pretty Little Thing campaign. (“A lot of youngsters seem to want to be photographed near one,” noted Linge.) Thousands of people apparently still use them. I wanted to know who they were and why, when technology had long ago surpassed what a phone box could offer, they were still heaving open their weirdly heavy doors and making a call.
People, remembering them in their prime, often talk about the smell. Cigarettes and cleaning fluid. A metallic odour on your fingers from the buttons. Once, there were phone directories on a shelf, then sex-worker cards wallpapering the door. In the early days, until the last manual switchboard closed in 1976, you spoke to an operator and told her – it was always her – what number you wanted to call.
Often, there were queues. “You’d have to walk round the corner shop and wait your turn,” said Martin White, owner of a company, X2 Connect, which repairs and resells old phone boxes that BT has removed. I visited White at his offices on an industrial estate in Newark, Nottinghamshire. His business has an inevitable limit, given the dwindling numbers of boxes. “Another thousand or so will do,” White told me. “Then that will be the end of that.” Surely White would know who was making all those calls. But no. He’d last used one “six years ago?” His kids, aged 38 and 36, had never been inside one, as far as he knew.
Posted onSeptember 15, 2019|Comments Off on Telephone Kiosk collection (1)
In August we visited the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings in Worcestershire – https://avoncroft.org.uk/ . The Museum is, in itself, definitely worth a visit – especially as dogs are welcome, but I went mainly to see the National Collection of Telephone Kiosks. An unexpected nerdy and cool feature what how they’d hooked up the boxes on display to the small on-site exchange. You can makes calls between the boxes.
The last UK phone boxes
This article has been reposted from The Guardian, by Sophie Elmhirst, 28 Apr 2022.
Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?
by Sophie Elmhirst
There used to be a phone box at the top of my street. It stood in the middle of a traffic island, near a bin, a lamp-post and a bollard. I never questioned the presence of the phone box, just as I never questioned the presence of the bin, the lamp-post or the bollard. Often, when we passed, my daughter and I would play the phone-box game. I had to stand to one side and pretend to call the phone in the phone box, which didn’t work. She would then pretend to answer, before making a series of further calls in a complicated unfolding of phone-related business that involved making plans, changing plans and then ringing everyone she had just spoken to again to tell them she was going to be late.
It was fun, this game, and it became hard to pass the phone box without playing it. The phone box, to her, was the best kind of toy. It was a real object that no longer worked, and therefore had the gravitas of something adults had once used, but could now be deployed to her own imaginative ends. It also had an extra, loopy charm. A giant phone housed in its own little shelter outside in the middle of the street made absolutely no sense. A phone, to her, was a small, shiny rectangle that lived in my coat pocket. This outdoor cubicle with a handset on a cord and fat, squishy buttons was both hilarious and mysterious, as if it had landed from the sky.
Walk round a city, a town, a village and you see them. The last phone boxes. Once you start seeing them, you see them everywhere. For a while, I became preoccupied by their contradictory presence, often standing proudly on a street corner, completely ignored. At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. Now, there are just over 20,000 working boxes left, which still sounds like quite a lot, given it’s hard to imagine anyone actually using one. And yet, they do. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. Five million! It seems impossible. A number so surprisingly large it made me think there must be a lone guy in a box somewhere obsessively making one-minute calls all day to random numbers.
Many of the phone boxes you still see are shells of their former selves: not working, not yet gone. Just there, a remnant of a former time, often used as a bin. Some have been repurposed. Since 2008, when BT launched its adopt-a-kiosk scheme, more than 7,000 phone boxes, mostly the old red ones, have been bought by local communities for £1 each. Now, they house things such as mini libraries, art galleries and plant displays; many contain defibrillators, for ready access in a medical emergency.
Those that remain occupy a particular place in Britain’s idea of itself. On Oxford Street, I passed a tourist shop whose window display included a shelf of miniature red phone boxes sitting alongside its close relations: the doubledecker bus, the black taxi and an old-fashioned post box, all symbolic of a storybook, Enid Blyton-ish Britain. “If you were to do a painting of an English village,” said Nigel Linge, professor of telecommunications at Salford University and probably Britain’s premier phone-box expert, “you’d have a duck pond, a church, a pub and I’d bet you’d have a phone box.” (Linge’s first phone-box memory: calling relatives from the one on his estate in the mining village of Willington, County Durham; his family didn’t get a phone in the house until the 1980s.) “I don’t think any other country is as passionate about their phone boxes as we are about ours,” he added.
To understand this unlikely passion, I started going into every phone box I passed. Typically, there was broken glass, discarded cider cans, an unmistakable smell of piss. Not much to love. One old red box in Camden was a wreck – no door, plastic bottles and browned leaves carpeting the floor, a handwritten note in the glass advertising a hot blonde. I picked up the receiver and heard, unbelievably, the long tone of a line open for calls. An old, old sound. And then, a memory dump from a mid-1990s adolescence. Back then, out with friends, I used phone boxes quite a lot. They were near bus stops, outside tube stations. The odd reverse-charge call in a mishap, begging lifts or forgiveness.
Now, the phone box is an object caught between existence and obsolescence. They seem pointless, and yet they endure, on our streets and in our culture, covered in creepers in the music video for Adele’s song Hello; clambered all over by One Direction for the cover of their 2012 album Take Me Home; being stroked by Molly-Mae Hague, in beige shorts and waistcoat, for a recent Pretty Little Thing campaign. (“A lot of youngsters seem to want to be photographed near one,” noted Linge.) Thousands of people apparently still use them. I wanted to know who they were and why, when technology had long ago surpassed what a phone box could offer, they were still heaving open their weirdly heavy doors and making a call.
People, remembering them in their prime, often talk about the smell. Cigarettes and cleaning fluid. A metallic odour on your fingers from the buttons. Once, there were phone directories on a shelf, then sex-worker cards wallpapering the door. In the early days, until the last manual switchboard closed in 1976, you spoke to an operator and told her – it was always her – what number you wanted to call.
Often, there were queues. “You’d have to walk round the corner shop and wait your turn,” said Martin White, owner of a company, X2 Connect, which repairs and resells old phone boxes that BT has removed. I visited White at his offices on an industrial estate in Newark, Nottinghamshire. His business has an inevitable limit, given the dwindling numbers of boxes. “Another thousand or so will do,” White told me. “Then that will be the end of that.” Surely White would know who was making all those calls. But no. He’d last used one “six years ago?” His kids, aged 38 and 36, had never been inside one, as far as he knew.
For the full article go to the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/28/last-phone-boxes-bt-payphones-uk
Comments Off on The last UK phone boxes
Posted in Comment, Geography
Tagged heritage and history, UK