UPDATE KC Disguises Hull Telecoms Street Cabinets with Street Art

The incumbent broadband and phone provider for Hull in East Yorkshire (England), KC, has this week begun covering some of their street cabinets in the Newland Avenue area with “street art” as part of the Culture Cabs exhibition, which was setup to celebrate the roll-out of their Lightstream fibre broadband (FTTP/C) service.

At the last count, in November 2013, KC’s new superfast broadband service had managed to pass around 25,000 premises (note: this is predicted to have now passed 30k) and 6,000 had subscribed, which represents a strong uptake for such a new technology.

Naturally KC decided that the best way to celebrate this was to have a bunch of local amateur and professional artists come along for the week and paint some of the areas normally green metal telecoms boxes (street cabinets) with their work.

Alan Worthing, KC Sales Director, said:

“We feel our final list of 10 [Culture Cabs] winners perfectly reflects Hull’s unique character and nature. We’re rolling out the fastest internet speeds in the UK, which will help businesses thrive in the run-up to 2017 and allow them to capitalise on the benefits being City of Culture brings. What better way to celebrate than giving local residents a platform to demonstrate their artistic capabilities and bring even more colour to the streets of the city.”

Each day this week two new street cabinets will be painted on two different streets. The exhibition started yesterday with Hull Graffiti, a street artist who impressed the judges with his “creativity and spraying skill“, painting one of the cabinets on Edgecumbe Street. Meanwhile Lydia Caprani did something similar on Sharp Street as she tried to reflect the city’s sizeable Polish population.

Sadly KC hasn’t published any official pictures of the work for us to include but we are asking for some. Meanwhile KC aims to make its fibre broadband service available to 45,000 premises by March 2015 (here) and unlike BT’s its “fibre broadband” is dominated by true 350Mbps capable fibre optic lines (FTTP/H) instead of slower hybrid fibre (though some FTTC has been used).

But it’s not the first time that a UK based telecoms operator has attempted to cover up its cabinets by changing their appearance. Openreach sometimes paints cabinets a different colour to match the surroundings and they’ve also toyed with Vinyl Wraps to camouflage them (here), as have Virgin Media.

Dates and Locations of the Culture Cab Street Cabinets

Monday 13th January

Artist: Hull Graffiti
Location: Edgecumbe Street

Artist: Lydia Caprani
Location: Sharp Street

Tuesday 14th January

Artist: Katie Spencer
Location: Vermont Street

Artist: Agnes Mieliauskaite
Location: Ventnor Street

Wednesday 15th January

Artists: Students from Newland School for Girls
Location: Haworth Street

Artist: Victoria Whincup
Location: Reynoldson Street

Thursday 16th January

Artist: Joe Cox
Location: Lambton Street

Artist: Rebecca Dennison
Location: Newland Avenue

Friday 17th January

Artist: Jess Zschorn
Location: Ash Grove

Artist: Rosie The New Adelphi Club
Location: Goddard Avenue

UPDATE 9:22am

KC has kindly provided a picture, which shows one of the street cabinets with a depiction of the Humber Bridge painting on its front.