Defunct phone booths now answering a new call

Once a familiar sight on streets all over the United Kingdom and its territories, the crown-topped red British telephone boxes are being reborn — as comically improbable coffee shops, offices and stores. While some local boxes already have been converted — a tiny library, a gallery for local artists and even a medical station with a cardiac defibrillator — a number of entrepreneurs now are buying or renting the defunct telephone boxes and turning them into eyecatching (albeit pint-sized) businesses.

Kape Barako in Hampstead, a tony suburb of North London, is a wildly popular coffee shop, while another box on Brighton Palace pier in East Sussex sells sun hats to optimistic beach goers. Smartphone addicts can squeeze in too: for a $31 monthly fee, Pod Works members get free Internet access, a 25-inch screen, scanning and printing via Wi-Fi and free national calls in their “pods” across the United Kingdom. (They aren’t like the Tardis police call box in “Doctor Who,” however — there’s no space for a meeting.)

Known by aficionados as the K6, the telephone boxes were created for the silver jubilee of King George V, and today many of the original 80-yearold, 8-foot-3-inch kiosks are protected as architecturally significant. British Telecom plans to decommission thousands more, but the rare K6’s in “currant red” are in high demand — even if shipping the 1,650-pound phone boxes can make for a very expensive nostalgia trip. Alternatively, if you’re looking to start your own stall or java joint, the rent starts at around $4,500 per year. (Although so far, none has shown up on Airbnb.)

Kape Barako The defunct British phone boxes have found new life as coffee kiosks, souvenir stores and work stations with Wi-Fi.

Daniel R. Jones / Getty Images A phone box in Michaelstonele-Pit, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, is being put to good use as the village library.