BRITISH PHONEBOX SERIES

Now, the phone box is an object caught between existence and obsolescence. The odd reverse-charge call in a mishap, begging lifts or forgiveness. They were near bus stops, outside tube stations. Back then, out with friends, I used phone boxes quite a lot. And then, a memory dump from a mid-1990s adolescence. I picked up the receiver and heard, unbelievably, the long tone of a line open for calls. 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. Typically, there was broken glass, discarded cider cans, an unmistakable smell of piss. To understand this unlikely passion, I started going into every phone box I passed. “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. 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. Those that remain occupy a particular place in Britain’s idea of itself. Now, they house things such as mini libraries, art galleries and plant displays many contain defibrillators, for ready access in a medical emergency. 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. Just there, a remnant of a former time, often used as a bin. Many of the phone boxes you still see are shells of their former selves: not working, not yet gone. 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. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. 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. At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. For a while, I became preoccupied by their contradictory presence, often standing proudly on a street corner, completely ignored. Once you start seeing them, you see them everywhere. Walk round a city, a town, a village and you see them. 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. A phone, to her, was a small, shiny rectangle that lived in my coat pocket. A giant phone housed in its own little shelter outside in the middle of the street made absolutely no sense. 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.

The phone box, to her, was the best kind of toy. It was fun, this game, and it became hard to pass the phone box without playing it.

BRITISH PHONEBOX SERIES

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. I had to stand to one side and pretend to call the phone in the phone box, which didn’t work. Often, when we passed, my daughter and I would play the phone-box game. 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. It stood in the middle of a traffic island, near a bin, a lamp-post and a bollard.

T here used to be a phone box at the top of my street.

British phonebox