Street Think Tank Calls for Removal of UK’s Old and Ugly Pay Phone Boxes
A new report from think tank Create Streets has suggested that the new UK government should make it easier for local authorities to remove old and “ugly” pay phone boxes, which are said to damage the look of many high streets by attracting litter, graffiti and.. other things.
The focus here is on the more modern boxes (e.g. KX100+), rather than BT’s classic red kiosks across the UK or KCOM’s cream-coloured ones in Hull – many of those are now protected. There are now roughly 20,000 remaining working payphones (aka – “Public Call Boxes” or PCB) across the UK, around 3,000 of which are in traditional red kiosks.
However, the new report suggests that more than half of the remaining boxes are likely to be “blighting” the UK’s streets, which are said to act as magnets for graffiti, littering, fly tipping, drug taking and worse. But the report claims that removing these can sometimes end up costing tens of thousands of pounds, such as when operators add a claim for lost advertising money.
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According to The Guardian‘s summary, the think tank suggests that one way to resolve this would be via a legislative change to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to make it easier to remove phone boxes. For example, changing it so that operators are only compensated for the cost to remove the box and not for any lost advertising revenue.
Nicholas Boys Smith, Founder of Create Street, said:
“Box blight is a menace hiding in plain sight, attracting litter, cluttering up our pavements and making all our streets and square a little bit uglier and less pleasant. We don’t have to put up with this and we shouldn’t. Other countries don’t. Our paper sets out practical steps that the new government can take now to make our streets and town centres better and more prosperous.”
We should point out that BT has spent the past few years decommissioning many of their old payphones, most of which were no longer being used – largely due to improvements in mobile coverage and related service affordability. Some of those have been replaced by the operator’s new smart WiFi Street Hub kiosks (mostly in cities), while others have been adopted by local authorities or registered charities under the “Adopt a Kiosk” scheme (e.g. turning them into WiFi hotspots, 4G small cells, mini libraries or storage for life-saving public defibrillators – there are about 700 of the latter).
Suffice to say that some of those old payphone boxes do more than merely act as ugly advertising holders, but certainly there will be others that people would perhaps rather see being removed. No doubt many of those reading this article today will be able to think of a few examples from their own area.
On the other hand, Ofcom does generally expect operators to retire unused boxes over time, and so most of those may still end up going extinct and without the need for new legislation. Put another way, there is probably more scope for a voluntary solution to this than complex and slow legislative change.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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As far as I now, the two lvl red buses, The Big Ben and the “ugly red phone boxes” are something wich represents The UK, every tourist knows that. Why would you destroy something so unicum and beautiful?
The story explicitly mentions that the traditional red boxes are not the focus, the newer KX100+ ones dated in the article from 1996 are.
You didn’t read the article did you
If you’d bothered to read the article before spewing onto your keyboard, you’d have read that they are removing the modern ones 1996+
100% agree. The red boxes should stay but all other’s are happy to be removed.
“The focus here is on the more modern boxes (e.g. KX100+), rather than BT’s classic red kiosks across the UK or KCOM’s cream-coloured ones in Hull – many of those are now protected. There are now roughly 20,000 remaining working payphones (aka – “Public Call Boxes” or PCB) across the UK, around 3,000 of which are in traditional red kiosks”.
These aren’t the classic red ones but the modern 1990s ones, which tend to be in poor condition.
Just to note that the name of the think tank is ‘Create Streets’.
More details here: https://www.createstreets.com/projects/box-blight-july-19th/
Report here: https://www.createstreets.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BoxBlight_final-1.pdf
(I am not affiliated and have no involvement with this think tank).
These phone boxes are part of our countries history
Wish they were the same with telegraph poles
I don’t think they are ugly I think they look nice and when you see them you bring back nostalgic feelings of the 80s.
I always liked the appearance of those late 1990s telephone boxes. I think they look smart. We have one near our local shops and I think it looks nice compared to the cell masts next to it. I probably make more use of the cell masts though :).
All the phone box designs will eventually be given listed status. However all public pay phone kiosks removed should still be replaced with the latest street hubs to maintain public phone access.
I never understood why they replaced the old red phone boxes with those horrible perspex things. They never looked good
They’re inaccessible to wheelchair users, easy to vandalise and their weight causes pavements to subside.
I was not a fan of the newer ones, they lacked something, but they were better for people with wheelchairs. Now phone boxes are more or less gone, the one around the corner from me is no more, and the one around the corner where i used to live is also no more. I remember going up there before we had a phone in the house and even after as we were not allowed to use the home phone as my brother had it installed for his mobile disco.
It is kind of sad, but also progress I suppose.
Was having a discussion with my mate regarding the 5g masts and the classic designed street furniture. What happened to putting a bit of effort in to street furniture design rather than the hideous thick 5g masts and oddly sized grey cabinets below them. Given how many more 5g masts are needed, with them being closer to people’s homes then if they had put more effort into their design then maybe there would be less people complaining and planning permission rejections.
They could be converted into space-efficient temporary housing for the homeless
The ones in central London usually smell of urine and are plastered with ads for escort services and massages.
Can we get rid of the Street Hubs instead, please?
This is why we can’t have nice things. If they’re a “blight” then force the owners to maintain them. If they can’t maintain them then charge the owner to maintain them until they choose to remove them.
Don’t just make it easier to remove what for some communities is still essential emergency infrastructure. That’s just dumb.
I completely agree.