Its iconic red exterior is recognisable to many around the world. It is a cultural icon, an immediate sign of Britishness, and one with a fascinating story behind it.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the British phone box, the history behind it, how it worked in the past, and how they are adapting to the modern world.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something that might seem boring and unimportant, merely a utility, a means of communication.
[00:00:30] But it is much more than that. It’s a cultural icon, an immediate sign of Britishness, and one with a fascinating story behind it too.
[00:00:41] Yes, it is the British phone box, and in this episode we are going to explore some history behind the phone box, talk about how they worked in the past, how they are adapting to the modern world, the interesting ways in which phone boxes are still used, and how you can buy one for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
[00:01:03] OK then, The British Phone Box.
[00:01:07] As regular listeners may know, I am from the UK, but I currently live on the small island of Malta, which is in the Mediterranean.
[00:01:18] Malta is an unusual place for a plethora of reasons, but something that often surprises visitors here are the clear signs of its British colonial history.
[00:01:31] In Malta, English is an official language.
[00:01:35] The cars drive on the left side of the road, the electrical plugs have three prongs, like they do in the UK.
[00:01:44] You can go to the Lady Di pub or the City of London pub and order a pint of English beer. If you so desire, you can even order a full English breakfast, complete with baked beans and hash browns.
[00:01:58] And, if you wander through the streets of many of the country’s towns, you might be surprised to see something that looks a little out of place: a British red phone box.
[00:02:12] You may well be able to imagine one of these already. Imagine a box, 1 metre by 1 metre, and rising almost 3 metres up.
[00:02:22] They are made of cast iron, and painted red, with a little dome on the top.
[00:02:29] And of course inside, there is a telephone.
[00:02:33] In Malta at least, the telephones don’t work any more; you can’t make a phone call from them.
[00:02:40] I’m not sure exactly when they stopped working, but they've been left there because they are considered part of the country’s cultural heritage.
[00:02:49] And it would appear from the amount of people who take pictures in them that they’re quite popular on social media too.
[00:02:56] You may well have seen these kinds of phone boxes yourself if you have visited the UK, perhaps you have posed for a photo inside one on the streets of London.
[00:03:06] Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were all left standing merely for the benefit of tourists. This isn’t the case, as we’ll talk about later on, but I want to first give you some history about this quintessential part of British culture.
[00:03:25] Firstly, the fact that these phone boxes are rather beautiful, they are aesthetically pleasing objects, this is no accident.
[00:03:35] The quintessential design that I described a minute ago was the result of a nationwide competition back in 1924.
[00:03:44] Something called the Royal Fine Art Commission was hired to advise on the process, and the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Academy of the Arts were also involved.
[00:03:56] This was no case of some middle manager saying “ok, that’ll do” and just getting lucky; some of the finest brains in British design and architecture were involved.
[00:04:10] The winner was the design that you see today, which was proposed by a man called Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who would go on in fact to design many famous buildings at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
[00:04:25] Interestingly enough, Scott’s initial plans did not call for the outside of the phone box to be painted red, but silver.
[00:04:35] This proposal was rejected, as if they were red they would be easier to see from further away.
[00:04:44] After all, the phone boxes were a public utility; they were to be installed up and down the country, available to all, for a small fee of course.
[00:04:55] The design was chosen, and before long, they started to appear on the streets of Britain.
[00:05:01] First, there were only a few, 1,000 in 1925, then 8,000 by 1930, but shortly afterwards the speed of installation really started to ramp up.
[00:05:14] 35,000 by 1940, 73,000 by the 1980s, and by the end of the century, in 1999, the number peaked at a reported 137,000.
[00:05:29] They were simply everywhere, on most street corners, on the sides of remote country roads, and outside village pubs.
[00:05:38] Even though they were at their peak in the late 1990s, their very existence and utility had started to be under threat as early as the 1980s, with the large increase in the number of people with landline phones at home.
[00:05:55] It sounds like a bit of an archaic thing to say nowadays, when the the number of people with a landline is decreasing, but having your own phone line at home meant that these phone boxes were principally of use to people who either didn’t have a landline or who didn’t live locally, perhaps they were travelling through and needed to make a phone call.
[00:06:17] And of course, with the rise of mobile phones, the value of having these more than 100,000 heavy boxes on the streets of Britain, well, it wasn’t always obvious.
[00:06:30] They have always been a target for criminals, as before they accepted card payments, clearly they would be full of cash, full of coins. And the fact that they were unattended meant that they were a constant target for petty criminals. With enough shaking and banging, ta-da, magic coins would come out.
[00:06:52] And even though they might not be full of cash in the same way as they were in the past, modern phone boxes remain the source of much illegal, or at least seedy activity.
[00:07:05] In an office I used to work in, in central London, the primary uses for the phone box right outside one of the meeting rooms seemed to be as a public toilet and a place to smoke crack cocaine.
[00:07:18] Oh, and there were also plenty of little calling cards with pictures of semi-naked women. I’m not sure whether the phone itself actually worked, whether you could make a phone call with it, but the structure was certainly in use, albeit a different use from the one it was intended for.
[00:07:38] After all, 96% of British adults have a mobile phone, the days of being out and about and having no way to contact someone else are long gone.
[00:07:49] So, there is less reason for these phone boxes to exist, but not no reason.
[00:07:55] Remember, these phone boxes are considered a public good.
[00:08:00] They are now administered by BT, British Telecom, which is a private company, but is regulated by the government and has strict guidelines it needs to follow.
[00:08:13] Specifically, with the case of the phone boxes, BT is required to maintain and keep them in operation if they meet certain criteria.
[00:08:24] For example, if 52 or more calls in a year are made from a phone box, so at least one a week on average.
[00:08:32] Or, if the phone box is in an area without mobile phone reception.
[00:08:37] You might think that a country like the UK would be pretty well covered in this respect, but there are more black spots than you might imagine.
[00:08:46] I used to work in an area of London called Wimbledon, where the famous tennis tournament is held, and the phone boxes there were preserved because it is a mobile phone blackspot; there is either no or very little mobile phone signal in certain areas of this part of London.
[00:09:04] And there are other reasons that a phone box needs to be protected, for example if it has been used to make an important call to the emergency services.
[00:09:13] Now, in terms of how often these phone boxes are used, and how they are used, you might find this surprising.
[00:09:23] OFCOM, the UK communications regulator, reports that there were 2.3 million calls made from phone boxes in 2022, that's more than 6,000 per day.
[00:09:36] Sure, this isn’t much when you compare it to the use of mobile phones, but they are still providing a crucial service to thousands of people every single day.
[00:09:48] Of course, the content of these calls is private, but we do know which numbers are being called.
[00:09:56] The most common category is to the emergency services, police, ambulance or fire services, which accounts for 150,000 calls, or just under 7% of the total.
[00:10:09] Another 25,000 were to Childline, the free support service for children who want advice on anything from day-to-day problems to reporting an abusive parent.
[00:10:22] And another 20,000 were to something called Samaritans, which is a free support service for adults, and is a service that is on the frontline of suicide prevention.
[00:10:35] So, in total that’s almost 10% of all calls that are going to some kind of assistance service, whether that is a call to an ambulance as someone has had a heart attack while out walking, a child needing to report an abusive parent, or someone who is contemplating taking their own life and wants to talk to someone.
[00:10:57] What's abundantly clear is that these phone boxes, although they might seem unused and unloved, they often provide a safe haven, a sanctuary for someone to have an anonymous conversation in, a conversation that they don’t want anyone at home to overhear or know about.
[00:11:16] There is still the remaining 90% of the 2.3 million phone calls that are a bit of a mystery.
[00:11:23] They aren’t going to emergency services or public numbers, they’re going to private individuals.
[00:11:29] There are stories of people, especially elderly people, who never got a landline installed at their house, and have always avoided a mobile phone, considering their local phone box to be “their phone”.
[00:11:44] Friends and relatives would call the phone box if they wanted to call these people, and friendly neighbours would answer the phone in the phone box if they heard it ringing, then knock on that person’s door and tell them their cousin Mike or Uncle Keith was on the line.
[00:12:00] These people are, naturally, in a minority, and one that is decreasing in size.
[00:12:07] Phone boxes are much more expensive and clearly less convenient than both landlines and mobile phones, so time’s winged chariot means that the number of people who use phone boxes in this way is getting smaller and smaller every year.
[00:12:24] And on a commercial level, BT, the company that operates these phone boxes, loses a huge amount of money by keeping the phone boxes in operation.
[00:12:36] There are now around 20,000 phone boxes in active service around the country, and, even when you take into account the money spent on making phone calls in these boxes, BT makes a net loss of £4.5 million a year.
[00:12:54] So it loses something like €5 million per year on phone boxes, or €250 per box.
[00:13:03] Put simply, they cost a lot of money to maintain, and they bring in very little money in return.
[00:13:11] It probably comes as no surprise there that BT is getting creative with ways of getting rid of the boxes when it can.
[00:13:20] The most recent initiative is to try to get a community to buy a phone box for £1 and use it for some kind of community good, whether that’s a small community library, storage for a defibrillator - the machine you use to save someone who is having a heart attack - or anything else that has a “community benefit”.
[00:13:43] According to the website, 7,200 phone boxes have been adopted so far, or sold so far. And even though BT might have only made €8,000 or so from the sale, it will save something like €2 million a year in costs.
[00:14:03] But, much like with a litter of puppies at an abandoned dog shelter, waiting hopefully to be chosen by prospective owners, the prettiest ones get taken first.
[00:14:15] And in the case of phone boxes in Britain, there are a lot of ugly mutts, unattractive designs.
[00:14:23] The phone box that we’ve been talking about today, and the one you might be imagining when you think of a British phone box, the 1920s “red phone box” design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, this is now in the minority.
[00:14:39] Of the 20,000 or so remaining phone boxes, only 3,000 are in this traditional “red kiosk” style.
[00:14:48] The rest are pretty unattractive, utilitarian boxes that were introduced in the late 1980s.
[00:14:56] Indeed, while doing the research for this episode I discovered a fascinating subculture of people who are completely passionate about different kinds of British phone boxes, and the most recent model seems to be universally panned, criticised for sacrificing style and design in the pursuit of utility.
[00:15:19] In the 1980s, the red boxes were considered too heavy, too expensive to make and too impractical, so they were ditched in favour of a more “modern” design made out of aluminium and glass.
[00:15:34] And, in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps, these supposedly modern phone boxes have found that they are so ugly and undesirable that they have no place in the modern world.
[00:15:47] Nobody wants to turn an ugly glass box into a book exchange or an art gallery or a mini coffee shop.
[00:15:55] But plenty of people, 7,200 and counting, want to adopt the oldest and original model, the model where style and design were placed above utility.
[00:16:07] So I’ll end this episode by saying that I think there’s a lesson we can all learn from that.
[00:16:15] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of The British Phone Box.
[00:16:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you travel to Britain and one of your friends says, “hey, take a photo of me in front of that red phone box”, well, you can say “I know a story about that”.
[00:16:34] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:37] Are there similar kinds of objects in your country, objects that once had a public utility but this has changed significantly over time?
[00:16:46] What are they, and how has their use changed in the modern world?
[00:16:49] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:16:53] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something that might seem boring and unimportant, merely a utility, a means of communication.
[00:00:30] But it is much more than that. It’s a cultural icon, an immediate sign of Britishness, and one with a fascinating story behind it too.
[00:00:41] Yes, it is the British phone box, and in this episode we are going to explore some history behind the phone box, talk about how they worked in the past, how they are adapting to the modern world, the interesting ways in which phone boxes are still used, and how you can buy one for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
[00:01:03] OK then, The British Phone Box.
[00:01:07] As regular listeners may know, I am from the UK, but I currently live on the small island of Malta, which is in the Mediterranean.
[00:01:18] Malta is an unusual place for a plethora of reasons, but something that often surprises visitors here are the clear signs of its British colonial history.
[00:01:31] In Malta, English is an official language.
[00:01:35] The cars drive on the left side of the road, the electrical plugs have three prongs, like they do in the UK.
[00:01:44] You can go to the Lady Di pub or the City of London pub and order a pint of English beer. If you so desire, you can even order a full English breakfast, complete with baked beans and hash browns.
[00:01:58] And, if you wander through the streets of many of the country’s towns, you might be surprised to see something that looks a little out of place: a British red phone box.
[00:02:12] You may well be able to imagine one of these already. Imagine a box, 1 metre by 1 metre, and rising almost 3 metres up.
[00:02:22] They are made of cast iron, and painted red, with a little dome on the top.
[00:02:29] And of course inside, there is a telephone.
[00:02:33] In Malta at least, the telephones don’t work any more; you can’t make a phone call from them.
[00:02:40] I’m not sure exactly when they stopped working, but they've been left there because they are considered part of the country’s cultural heritage.
[00:02:49] And it would appear from the amount of people who take pictures in them that they’re quite popular on social media too.
[00:02:56] You may well have seen these kinds of phone boxes yourself if you have visited the UK, perhaps you have posed for a photo inside one on the streets of London.
[00:03:06] Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were all left standing merely for the benefit of tourists. This isn’t the case, as we’ll talk about later on, but I want to first give you some history about this quintessential part of British culture.
[00:03:25] Firstly, the fact that these phone boxes are rather beautiful, they are aesthetically pleasing objects, this is no accident.
[00:03:35] The quintessential design that I described a minute ago was the result of a nationwide competition back in 1924.
[00:03:44] Something called the Royal Fine Art Commission was hired to advise on the process, and the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Academy of the Arts were also involved.
[00:03:56] This was no case of some middle manager saying “ok, that’ll do” and just getting lucky; some of the finest brains in British design and architecture were involved.
[00:04:10] The winner was the design that you see today, which was proposed by a man called Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who would go on in fact to design many famous buildings at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
[00:04:25] Interestingly enough, Scott’s initial plans did not call for the outside of the phone box to be painted red, but silver.
[00:04:35] This proposal was rejected, as if they were red they would be easier to see from further away.
[00:04:44] After all, the phone boxes were a public utility; they were to be installed up and down the country, available to all, for a small fee of course.
[00:04:55] The design was chosen, and before long, they started to appear on the streets of Britain.
[00:05:01] First, there were only a few, 1,000 in 1925, then 8,000 by 1930, but shortly afterwards the speed of installation really started to ramp up.
[00:05:14] 35,000 by 1940, 73,000 by the 1980s, and by the end of the century, in 1999, the number peaked at a reported 137,000.
[00:05:29] They were simply everywhere, on most street corners, on the sides of remote country roads, and outside village pubs.
[00:05:38] Even though they were at their peak in the late 1990s, their very existence and utility had started to be under threat as early as the 1980s, with the large increase in the number of people with landline phones at home.
[00:05:55] It sounds like a bit of an archaic thing to say nowadays, when the the number of people with a landline is decreasing, but having your own phone line at home meant that these phone boxes were principally of use to people who either didn’t have a landline or who didn’t live locally, perhaps they were travelling through and needed to make a phone call.
[00:06:17] And of course, with the rise of mobile phones, the value of having these more than 100,000 heavy boxes on the streets of Britain, well, it wasn’t always obvious.
[00:06:30] They have always been a target for criminals, as before they accepted card payments, clearly they would be full of cash, full of coins. And the fact that they were unattended meant that they were a constant target for petty criminals. With enough shaking and banging, ta-da, magic coins would come out.
[00:06:52] And even though they might not be full of cash in the same way as they were in the past, modern phone boxes remain the source of much illegal, or at least seedy activity.
[00:07:05] In an office I used to work in, in central London, the primary uses for the phone box right outside one of the meeting rooms seemed to be as a public toilet and a place to smoke crack cocaine.
[00:07:18] Oh, and there were also plenty of little calling cards with pictures of semi-naked women. I’m not sure whether the phone itself actually worked, whether you could make a phone call with it, but the structure was certainly in use, albeit a different use from the one it was intended for.
[00:07:38] After all, 96% of British adults have a mobile phone, the days of being out and about and having no way to contact someone else are long gone.
[00:07:49] So, there is less reason for these phone boxes to exist, but not no reason.
[00:07:55] Remember, these phone boxes are considered a public good.
[00:08:00] They are now administered by BT, British Telecom, which is a private company, but is regulated by the government and has strict guidelines it needs to follow.
[00:08:13] Specifically, with the case of the phone boxes, BT is required to maintain and keep them in operation if they meet certain criteria.
[00:08:24] For example, if 52 or more calls in a year are made from a phone box, so at least one a week on average.
[00:08:32] Or, if the phone box is in an area without mobile phone reception.
[00:08:37] You might think that a country like the UK would be pretty well covered in this respect, but there are more black spots than you might imagine.
[00:08:46] I used to work in an area of London called Wimbledon, where the famous tennis tournament is held, and the phone boxes there were preserved because it is a mobile phone blackspot; there is either no or very little mobile phone signal in certain areas of this part of London.
[00:09:04] And there are other reasons that a phone box needs to be protected, for example if it has been used to make an important call to the emergency services.
[00:09:13] Now, in terms of how often these phone boxes are used, and how they are used, you might find this surprising.
[00:09:23] OFCOM, the UK communications regulator, reports that there were 2.3 million calls made from phone boxes in 2022, that's more than 6,000 per day.
[00:09:36] Sure, this isn’t much when you compare it to the use of mobile phones, but they are still providing a crucial service to thousands of people every single day.
[00:09:48] Of course, the content of these calls is private, but we do know which numbers are being called.
[00:09:56] The most common category is to the emergency services, police, ambulance or fire services, which accounts for 150,000 calls, or just under 7% of the total.
[00:10:09] Another 25,000 were to Childline, the free support service for children who want advice on anything from day-to-day problems to reporting an abusive parent.
[00:10:22] And another 20,000 were to something called Samaritans, which is a free support service for adults, and is a service that is on the frontline of suicide prevention.
[00:10:35] So, in total that’s almost 10% of all calls that are going to some kind of assistance service, whether that is a call to an ambulance as someone has had a heart attack while out walking, a child needing to report an abusive parent, or someone who is contemplating taking their own life and wants to talk to someone.
[00:10:57] What's abundantly clear is that these phone boxes, although they might seem unused and unloved, they often provide a safe haven, a sanctuary for someone to have an anonymous conversation in, a conversation that they don’t want anyone at home to overhear or know about.
[00:11:16] There is still the remaining 90% of the 2.3 million phone calls that are a bit of a mystery.
[00:11:23] They aren’t going to emergency services or public numbers, they’re going to private individuals.
[00:11:29] There are stories of people, especially elderly people, who never got a landline installed at their house, and have always avoided a mobile phone, considering their local phone box to be “their phone”.
[00:11:44] Friends and relatives would call the phone box if they wanted to call these people, and friendly neighbours would answer the phone in the phone box if they heard it ringing, then knock on that person’s door and tell them their cousin Mike or Uncle Keith was on the line.
[00:12:00] These people are, naturally, in a minority, and one that is decreasing in size.
[00:12:07] Phone boxes are much more expensive and clearly less convenient than both landlines and mobile phones, so time’s winged chariot means that the number of people who use phone boxes in this way is getting smaller and smaller every year.
[00:12:24] And on a commercial level, BT, the company that operates these phone boxes, loses a huge amount of money by keeping the phone boxes in operation.
[00:12:36] There are now around 20,000 phone boxes in active service around the country, and, even when you take into account the money spent on making phone calls in these boxes, BT makes a net loss of £4.5 million a year.
[00:12:54] So it loses something like €5 million per year on phone boxes, or €250 per box.
[00:13:03] Put simply, they cost a lot of money to maintain, and they bring in very little money in return.
[00:13:11] It probably comes as no surprise there that BT is getting creative with ways of getting rid of the boxes when it can.
[00:13:20] The most recent initiative is to try to get a community to buy a phone box for £1 and use it for some kind of community good, whether that’s a small community library, storage for a defibrillator - the machine you use to save someone who is having a heart attack - or anything else that has a “community benefit”.
[00:13:43] According to the website, 7,200 phone boxes have been adopted so far, or sold so far. And even though BT might have only made €8,000 or so from the sale, it will save something like €2 million a year in costs.
[00:14:03] But, much like with a litter of puppies at an abandoned dog shelter, waiting hopefully to be chosen by prospective owners, the prettiest ones get taken first.
[00:14:15] And in the case of phone boxes in Britain, there are a lot of ugly mutts, unattractive designs.
[00:14:23] The phone box that we’ve been talking about today, and the one you might be imagining when you think of a British phone box, the 1920s “red phone box” design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, this is now in the minority.
[00:14:39] Of the 20,000 or so remaining phone boxes, only 3,000 are in this traditional “red kiosk” style.
[00:14:48] The rest are pretty unattractive, utilitarian boxes that were introduced in the late 1980s.
[00:14:56] Indeed, while doing the research for this episode I discovered a fascinating subculture of people who are completely passionate about different kinds of British phone boxes, and the most recent model seems to be universally panned, criticised for sacrificing style and design in the pursuit of utility.
[00:15:19] In the 1980s, the red boxes were considered too heavy, too expensive to make and too impractical, so they were ditched in favour of a more “modern” design made out of aluminium and glass.
[00:15:34] And, in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps, these supposedly modern phone boxes have found that they are so ugly and undesirable that they have no place in the modern world.
[00:15:47] Nobody wants to turn an ugly glass box into a book exchange or an art gallery or a mini coffee shop.
[00:15:55] But plenty of people, 7,200 and counting, want to adopt the oldest and original model, the model where style and design were placed above utility.
[00:16:07] So I’ll end this episode by saying that I think there’s a lesson we can all learn from that.
[00:16:15] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of The British Phone Box.
[00:16:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you travel to Britain and one of your friends says, “hey, take a photo of me in front of that red phone box”, well, you can say “I know a story about that”.
[00:16:34] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:37] Are there similar kinds of objects in your country, objects that once had a public utility but this has changed significantly over time?
[00:16:46] What are they, and how has their use changed in the modern world?
[00:16:49] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:16:53] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something that might seem boring and unimportant, merely a utility, a means of communication.
[00:00:30] But it is much more than that. It’s a cultural icon, an immediate sign of Britishness, and one with a fascinating story behind it too.
[00:00:41] Yes, it is the British phone box, and in this episode we are going to explore some history behind the phone box, talk about how they worked in the past, how they are adapting to the modern world, the interesting ways in which phone boxes are still used, and how you can buy one for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
[00:01:03] OK then, The British Phone Box.
[00:01:07] As regular listeners may know, I am from the UK, but I currently live on the small island of Malta, which is in the Mediterranean.
[00:01:18] Malta is an unusual place for a plethora of reasons, but something that often surprises visitors here are the clear signs of its British colonial history.
[00:01:31] In Malta, English is an official language.
[00:01:35] The cars drive on the left side of the road, the electrical plugs have three prongs, like they do in the UK.
[00:01:44] You can go to the Lady Di pub or the City of London pub and order a pint of English beer. If you so desire, you can even order a full English breakfast, complete with baked beans and hash browns.
[00:01:58] And, if you wander through the streets of many of the country’s towns, you might be surprised to see something that looks a little out of place: a British red phone box.
[00:02:12] You may well be able to imagine one of these already. Imagine a box, 1 metre by 1 metre, and rising almost 3 metres up.
[00:02:22] They are made of cast iron, and painted red, with a little dome on the top.
[00:02:29] And of course inside, there is a telephone.
[00:02:33] In Malta at least, the telephones don’t work any more; you can’t make a phone call from them.
[00:02:40] I’m not sure exactly when they stopped working, but they've been left there because they are considered part of the country’s cultural heritage.
[00:02:49] And it would appear from the amount of people who take pictures in them that they’re quite popular on social media too.
[00:02:56] You may well have seen these kinds of phone boxes yourself if you have visited the UK, perhaps you have posed for a photo inside one on the streets of London.
[00:03:06] Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were all left standing merely for the benefit of tourists. This isn’t the case, as we’ll talk about later on, but I want to first give you some history about this quintessential part of British culture.
[00:03:25] Firstly, the fact that these phone boxes are rather beautiful, they are aesthetically pleasing objects, this is no accident.
[00:03:35] The quintessential design that I described a minute ago was the result of a nationwide competition back in 1924.
[00:03:44] Something called the Royal Fine Art Commission was hired to advise on the process, and the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Academy of the Arts were also involved.
[00:03:56] This was no case of some middle manager saying “ok, that’ll do” and just getting lucky; some of the finest brains in British design and architecture were involved.
[00:04:10] The winner was the design that you see today, which was proposed by a man called Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who would go on in fact to design many famous buildings at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
[00:04:25] Interestingly enough, Scott’s initial plans did not call for the outside of the phone box to be painted red, but silver.
[00:04:35] This proposal was rejected, as if they were red they would be easier to see from further away.
[00:04:44] After all, the phone boxes were a public utility; they were to be installed up and down the country, available to all, for a small fee of course.
[00:04:55] The design was chosen, and before long, they started to appear on the streets of Britain.
[00:05:01] First, there were only a few, 1,000 in 1925, then 8,000 by 1930, but shortly afterwards the speed of installation really started to ramp up.
[00:05:14] 35,000 by 1940, 73,000 by the 1980s, and by the end of the century, in 1999, the number peaked at a reported 137,000.
[00:05:29] They were simply everywhere, on most street corners, on the sides of remote country roads, and outside village pubs.
[00:05:38] Even though they were at their peak in the late 1990s, their very existence and utility had started to be under threat as early as the 1980s, with the large increase in the number of people with landline phones at home.
[00:05:55] It sounds like a bit of an archaic thing to say nowadays, when the the number of people with a landline is decreasing, but having your own phone line at home meant that these phone boxes were principally of use to people who either didn’t have a landline or who didn’t live locally, perhaps they were travelling through and needed to make a phone call.
[00:06:17] And of course, with the rise of mobile phones, the value of having these more than 100,000 heavy boxes on the streets of Britain, well, it wasn’t always obvious.
[00:06:30] They have always been a target for criminals, as before they accepted card payments, clearly they would be full of cash, full of coins. And the fact that they were unattended meant that they were a constant target for petty criminals. With enough shaking and banging, ta-da, magic coins would come out.
[00:06:52] And even though they might not be full of cash in the same way as they were in the past, modern phone boxes remain the source of much illegal, or at least seedy activity.
[00:07:05] In an office I used to work in, in central London, the primary uses for the phone box right outside one of the meeting rooms seemed to be as a public toilet and a place to smoke crack cocaine.
[00:07:18] Oh, and there were also plenty of little calling cards with pictures of semi-naked women. I’m not sure whether the phone itself actually worked, whether you could make a phone call with it, but the structure was certainly in use, albeit a different use from the one it was intended for.
[00:07:38] After all, 96% of British adults have a mobile phone, the days of being out and about and having no way to contact someone else are long gone.
[00:07:49] So, there is less reason for these phone boxes to exist, but not no reason.
[00:07:55] Remember, these phone boxes are considered a public good.
[00:08:00] They are now administered by BT, British Telecom, which is a private company, but is regulated by the government and has strict guidelines it needs to follow.
[00:08:13] Specifically, with the case of the phone boxes, BT is required to maintain and keep them in operation if they meet certain criteria.
[00:08:24] For example, if 52 or more calls in a year are made from a phone box, so at least one a week on average.
[00:08:32] Or, if the phone box is in an area without mobile phone reception.
[00:08:37] You might think that a country like the UK would be pretty well covered in this respect, but there are more black spots than you might imagine.
[00:08:46] I used to work in an area of London called Wimbledon, where the famous tennis tournament is held, and the phone boxes there were preserved because it is a mobile phone blackspot; there is either no or very little mobile phone signal in certain areas of this part of London.
[00:09:04] And there are other reasons that a phone box needs to be protected, for example if it has been used to make an important call to the emergency services.
[00:09:13] Now, in terms of how often these phone boxes are used, and how they are used, you might find this surprising.
[00:09:23] OFCOM, the UK communications regulator, reports that there were 2.3 million calls made from phone boxes in 2022, that's more than 6,000 per day.
[00:09:36] Sure, this isn’t much when you compare it to the use of mobile phones, but they are still providing a crucial service to thousands of people every single day.
[00:09:48] Of course, the content of these calls is private, but we do know which numbers are being called.
[00:09:56] The most common category is to the emergency services, police, ambulance or fire services, which accounts for 150,000 calls, or just under 7% of the total.
[00:10:09] Another 25,000 were to Childline, the free support service for children who want advice on anything from day-to-day problems to reporting an abusive parent.
[00:10:22] And another 20,000 were to something called Samaritans, which is a free support service for adults, and is a service that is on the frontline of suicide prevention.
[00:10:35] So, in total that’s almost 10% of all calls that are going to some kind of assistance service, whether that is a call to an ambulance as someone has had a heart attack while out walking, a child needing to report an abusive parent, or someone who is contemplating taking their own life and wants to talk to someone.
[00:10:57] What's abundantly clear is that these phone boxes, although they might seem unused and unloved, they often provide a safe haven, a sanctuary for someone to have an anonymous conversation in, a conversation that they don’t want anyone at home to overhear or know about.
[00:11:16] There is still the remaining 90% of the 2.3 million phone calls that are a bit of a mystery.
[00:11:23] They aren’t going to emergency services or public numbers, they’re going to private individuals.
[00:11:29] There are stories of people, especially elderly people, who never got a landline installed at their house, and have always avoided a mobile phone, considering their local phone box to be “their phone”.
[00:11:44] Friends and relatives would call the phone box if they wanted to call these people, and friendly neighbours would answer the phone in the phone box if they heard it ringing, then knock on that person’s door and tell them their cousin Mike or Uncle Keith was on the line.
[00:12:00] These people are, naturally, in a minority, and one that is decreasing in size.
[00:12:07] Phone boxes are much more expensive and clearly less convenient than both landlines and mobile phones, so time’s winged chariot means that the number of people who use phone boxes in this way is getting smaller and smaller every year.
[00:12:24] And on a commercial level, BT, the company that operates these phone boxes, loses a huge amount of money by keeping the phone boxes in operation.
[00:12:36] There are now around 20,000 phone boxes in active service around the country, and, even when you take into account the money spent on making phone calls in these boxes, BT makes a net loss of £4.5 million a year.
[00:12:54] So it loses something like €5 million per year on phone boxes, or €250 per box.
[00:13:03] Put simply, they cost a lot of money to maintain, and they bring in very little money in return.
[00:13:11] It probably comes as no surprise there that BT is getting creative with ways of getting rid of the boxes when it can.
[00:13:20] The most recent initiative is to try to get a community to buy a phone box for £1 and use it for some kind of community good, whether that’s a small community library, storage for a defibrillator - the machine you use to save someone who is having a heart attack - or anything else that has a “community benefit”.
[00:13:43] According to the website, 7,200 phone boxes have been adopted so far, or sold so far. And even though BT might have only made €8,000 or so from the sale, it will save something like €2 million a year in costs.
[00:14:03] But, much like with a litter of puppies at an abandoned dog shelter, waiting hopefully to be chosen by prospective owners, the prettiest ones get taken first.
[00:14:15] And in the case of phone boxes in Britain, there are a lot of ugly mutts, unattractive designs.
[00:14:23] The phone box that we’ve been talking about today, and the one you might be imagining when you think of a British phone box, the 1920s “red phone box” design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, this is now in the minority.
[00:14:39] Of the 20,000 or so remaining phone boxes, only 3,000 are in this traditional “red kiosk” style.
[00:14:48] The rest are pretty unattractive, utilitarian boxes that were introduced in the late 1980s.
[00:14:56] Indeed, while doing the research for this episode I discovered a fascinating subculture of people who are completely passionate about different kinds of British phone boxes, and the most recent model seems to be universally panned, criticised for sacrificing style and design in the pursuit of utility.
[00:15:19] In the 1980s, the red boxes were considered too heavy, too expensive to make and too impractical, so they were ditched in favour of a more “modern” design made out of aluminium and glass.
[00:15:34] And, in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps, these supposedly modern phone boxes have found that they are so ugly and undesirable that they have no place in the modern world.
[00:15:47] Nobody wants to turn an ugly glass box into a book exchange or an art gallery or a mini coffee shop.
[00:15:55] But plenty of people, 7,200 and counting, want to adopt the oldest and original model, the model where style and design were placed above utility.
[00:16:07] So I’ll end this episode by saying that I think there’s a lesson we can all learn from that.
[00:16:15] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of The British Phone Box.
[00:16:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that if you travel to Britain and one of your friends says, “hey, take a photo of me in front of that red phone box”, well, you can say “I know a story about that”.
[00:16:34] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:16:37] Are there similar kinds of objects in your country, objects that once had a public utility but this has changed significantly over time?
[00:16:46] What are they, and how has their use changed in the modern world?
[00:16:49] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:16:53] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:17:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
