Phone box less red than read
The British telephone box is not dead yet. In parts of central London, a box stands sentinel every 30 metres — and if phone companies got their way, they’d plant many more.
But these are not the red cast-iron cubicles that for generations were emblems of Britain. Instead, critics say, they are eyesores, covered in digital ad screens and capable of being turned into surveillance posts.
Worst of all, perhaps, some are being imported from New York.
The result is a battle over Britain’s public space, waged between city planners and telecommunications firms. The most contentious fight is in Westminster, in the heart of London, where new phone kiosks are being squished between construction barriers and bus stops on crowded streets.
The classic red booths, with domed roofs and moulded royal crowns, were rendered obsolete by the rise of cellphones. Yet, phone companies never relinquished their rights to the sidewalk. Under British rules that have effectively been in place since before the iPhone existed, phone boxes are still considered vital infrastructure, and companies with proper licences can keep building them so long as local councils cannot credibly object to the particular site or design.
And so the phone companies set about to put up a new kind of booth: two-sided digital displays with internet connectivity and touchscreen maps that flash craft-beer and credit-card ads — and also have a phone attached.
“A lot of them are advertising totems with a telephone handset on it,” said John Walker, director of planning for Westminster City Council. “They’re just a blot on the landscape.”
Some councils are being flooded with phone box proposals at numbers 900 per cent higher than a few years ago, according to an association of councils in England and Wales. Companies have submitted proposals for 300 new and replacement kiosks in the last two years in Westminster alone, where the boxes already stand six to a block on a stretch of busy Edgware Rd.
The councils are lobbying the central government to change the law.
Critics call the profusion of high-tech, advertising-centric booths — kiosks, in the new parlance of phone companies — one piece of a broader sell-off of Britain’s public space. The phone boxes passed from public into private hands in the 1980s when British Telecom was privatized under Margaret Thatcher and its monopoly over the booths ended.
With austerity measures slashing budgets and leaving streets with potholes, councils are also contending with proposals for what they call glorified billboards.