We’ll miss public phone boxes when they’re gone

John Grindrod, The Independent

The car phone, the fax machine, the pager… For better or worse, all icons of 1980s communications design. As is the steel-and-glass telephone kiosk – the KX100 – introduced by BT in 1985, and produced in their tens of thousands. There’s one around the corner from me in Milton Keynes, nestled in a purpose-built alcove like a sleeper agent from another time, waiting to be reactivated. They are such an ubiquitous part of our streetscape that they’ve become almost invisible. And, in many cases, we physically can’t see them at all, wrapped as they are these days by vinyl ads or plastered in hasty fly-posters. Which are nothing compared to the lurid prostitutes’ cards you might find inside…

Two recent events have brought these kiosks — and their fate — back into the news: campaigning think-tank Create Streets has released a report highlighting how poorly maintained they are — and how costly it is to remove them from the public realm, thanks to the advertising companies that now own them and charge thousands of pounds in lost revenue. Meanwhile, the Twentieth Century Society, the campaigning group responsible for getting listed status for the original red telephone boxes, have just announced that although a mass listing of the KX100s is “neither a credible or a desirable prospect”, they would like to preserve three of them as a reminder of one of the final iterations of the phone box, a story that began in 1920.

They’re suggesting saving the 100,000th to be installed, in Lancashire; the most remote Scottish one; and a solar-powered one in Wales. “We’ve picked three that tell amazing stories,” Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, tells me, “so that the final chapter of a classic design lineage is preserved, not just in a museum, but in the public realm, where it was designed to function and survive”. It seems hard to recall now, but before the original Giles Gilbert Scott red telephone boxes were listed, they had become a national joke, too – so often vandalised, out of order or smelling of wee.

The KX100s were designed to be more resilient, rustproof and well ventilated (well, not urine traps, at least) — and also more accessible for wheelchair users. Updating the phone box was overseen by David Carter Associates, which designed everything from the Stanley knife to the vehicle-carrying Eurotunnel trains. But still, over time, these boxes have succumbed to the ravages of constant use and neglect, eventually seeing much of their purpose undermined by the advent of mobile phones. Already, 70 per cent of them have gone, with 5,000 converted to community use: mini-libraries; defibrillators; micropubs.

The KX100s might not be everyone’s idea of a design icon, but they do have their fans. Writer and artist Johny Pitts has long had an obsession with these much-maligned late 20th century phone boxes, and has been photographing them for the last 15 years, amassing a bizarre and fascinating archive in the process. “They contain a specific hue of artificial light that reminds me of rainy nights in the 90s,” he tells me, likening their time-travelling quality to that of the Tardis. “They have that scent of urine and metal you sometimes find in unloved council estate lifts,” he says. “But when you find one in good condition, they’re an example of quite beautiful and elegant modernist design.” While there might be calls for their complete removal — and certainly, in the smartphone age, there’s little regular need for phone boxes — it is worth remembering that many are still in use, providing an essential lifeline for more vulnerable people, and there for us in emergencies.

The onus here is on the operators to maintain these once-shiny and sleek capsules, rather than to allow them and their reputation to sink further into shame and hostility. And the boxes themselves are, as Pitts says, time-travel devices, too, back to a different culture. The distinction between the red phone boxes being heritage — and these more recent ones not — feels wrong to me. After all, heritage doesn’t mean gentility, it’s simply our inheritance. And, a bit like pretending one side of your family is better than the other, making that kind of distinction never ends well. And after all we’ve put those poor kiosks through, the least we can do is respect their decades of loyal service — and maybe give them a clean once in a while.