‘I don’t want it to die’: one man’s battle to save the last phone box in his village‘
Source The Guardian, 27 February 25, by Emine Saner.
In 1935, Derek Harris was born – and so was the K6 red phone box. Now, Harris is spending his 90th year ensuring this beloved local facility isn’t lost.
The battleground at the heart of a struggle between an 89-year-old man and a multi-billion pound multinational is a small junction in a Norfolk village, where a red phone box stands. And at the red phone box, sheltering from the wind, is Derek Harris. Last month, he learned that BT (formerly British Telecom) was threatening to close the phone box in the village of Sharrington, where he has lived for 50 years, when he saw it on the agenda of the parish council meeting. “I thought: ‘I’d better do something about this,’” says Harris.
He has described it as a “David and Goliath” campaign. It is that, and – as becomes clear on this sunlit but biting February day – so much more. We will talk mortality and reprieves, heritage and value. I’ll leave with a renewed sense of how it’s possible to feel real affection for an inanimate object, and why having a mission matters.
First, though, some field mice. Sharrington is in a picturesque part of East Anglian countryside. “We’re surrounded by open, rolling, wonderful fields – arable, beautiful,” says Harris, “except they’re inhabited by field mice – and field mice have developed a penchant for the PVC that protects the copper cabling [of phone lines]. Opposite the church, which is just up the road, there is a telegraph pole, and in it, there are three mice nesting.” His eyes sparkle. The rodents gnawed through the wires, disrupting villagers’ phone lines and internet. He knows about the mice, he says, because an engineer from Openreach, the BT-owned company that looks after the network, told him.
Harris keeps an eye on Openreach, because there is a green junction box, connected to the new fibreoptic cables, barely a couple of metres from the phone box. It wouldn’t take much to connect the payphone to fibreoptic, insists Harris – as with the whole telephone network, phone boxes will need to be upgraded to digital lines by the time the analogue network is switched off in 2027. “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be connected, and so I’ve set my heart on it.” He says engineers visit most weeks anyway. “So maintenance [of the phone box] would be no problem. It’s cost-effective.”
The UK has 14,000 working phone boxes, down from 20,000 three years ago; at their peak in the 1990s, there were 100,000. Of these, around 3,000 are the iconic red design. When about 95% of households have a mobile phone, it’s perhaps a wonder that phone boxes survive at all.
Owned and run by BT, and costing millions of pounds each year, they are required by the regulator Ofcom under the quaintly named telephony universal service obligation. In the year to May 2020, almost 150,000 calls were made to emergency services from phone boxes, as well as 25,000 and 20,000 calls made to Childline and Samaritans, respectively.
For the full article please go to The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/27/battle-save-last-phone-box-norfolk-village
