Red phone boxes back on sale
Recognised by the Design Museum as an icon of the British street scene, BT has announced that it is to sell off its stock of surplus red phone boxes for the first time in 25 years.
Does anything say ‘British street’ more than the sight of a red phone box?
Now anyone with £2,000 or so to spare could acquire their own classic K6 phone box.
Introduced in 1936 to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V, the kiosk No 6 was designed by the English architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. By 1968 there were nearly 70,000 in Britain.
It was the first genuinely standard telephone box to be installed all over the country – and its status as a design icon was confirmed by English Heritage, which has given some 2,000 of them grade II listing: “where they have a strong visual relationship with more than one listed building, or are in a setting of special significance.” However the famously visible red colour was not specified by designer Gilbert Scott, who had wanted the boxes to be painted silver in cities and dove-grey in the country.
In the 1980s thousands of old K6 boxes were sold off in their hundreds at public auctions making anything from £50 to £3,000. They went on to new lives as tourist attractions, shower cubicles and bars. Despite standing 2.4 metres (8’3″) high and weighing in at 762 kilograms (three quarters of a tonne), the boxes are still sold around the world – Bob Thorpe of Uniquely British told Channel 4 News he had sold one this week to a customer in Arizona and had previously shipped boxes to Australia, France and Russia.
Community re-use
More than 1,800 decommissioned boxes have already been sold through the “adopt a kiosk” scheme, which allowed local communities to purchase and preserve their red box for just £1. They have since been put to a variety of uses, including community libraries, art galleries and swapshops. Some even had life-saving defibrillation kits installed – accessible by calling 999 and dialling in a combination code given out by the emergency services.
It may be a quarter of a century since the last sale by BT of surplus red phone box stock, but it seems likely more will inevitably come on to the market. There are currently 11,000 traditional red boxes across the UK, but payphone use has declined 80 per cent in the last five years and some 60 per cent of payphones now lose money.
Research by the media regulator Ofcom in 2006 found that “virtually no consumers now rely on PCBs [public phone boxes] as their primary means of making calls”. But payphones will not disappear altogether, as BT is under a legal requirement to give “reasonable geographic access to call box services from public call boxes.”