The long read: Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?
, dull grey and black with a boxy, flat-topped shape that abandoned all of the blazing-red, domed-roof chutzpah of the earlier version. No Dubai shopping mall was coming for those.
BT is therefore left in a bind, required to maintain thousands of phone boxes that dent its profits. James Browne, BT’s “head of street”, assured me that it “takes its responsibility to provide street-based telephony very seriously” and as such, the company has come up with a new ruse, the Street Hub 2.0 – a tall, flat screen wedged into the pavement offering rolling advertising space and, if you look closely enough, free wifi and calling facilities.
Pretty as the villages might be, up there on the mountains, conditions can be rough. Walkers fall all the time. The Keswick mountain rescue team performed 126 rescues last year. Rob Grange, one of the team, told me that even if you’re able to scramble down for help, half of the few cottages in the valley are holiday rentals and dark for most of the year. “You come down off the fell,” said Grange, with a faraway look that suggested sleet and adversity, “and there’s nobody there.
On a recent grey afternoon, she took me from one grotty specimen to another, the kind of boxes where no one wants to start a community library or pose in beige shorts. One had what looked like green algae spreading up its walls; another seemed to have been whitewashed on the inside, as if to obscure criminal activity taking place within, or just its regular use as a toilet. “Would you see these in Richmond?” said Cunneen, pointing at a particularly bleak kiosk by the tube station.
According to Mat Harris, who knows Ottewell and runs the site that auctions his boxes, Ottewell bought up listed boxes in good locations – Brighton, Greenwich, Hampton Court, Hampstead – where his clients knew that their business selling coffee or sandwiches, or whatever else they could flog from a tiny box, would have plenty of passing traffic.
The most devoted phone-box user I heard about, however, was Eric Dewhurst of Bretherton, Lancashire. Dewhurst lived alone, opposite an old red box which he. Most days, he’d take his bag of 20ps across the road and install himself for his daily calls, often to his older brother, Bill, or to his nieces, Carole and Elaine. They once bought him a mobile phone, but he refused to touch it. “He didn’t like change,” Elaine told me.
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