By Lucy Kenningham
A campaign to save Britain’s ugliest phone booths highlights the subjectivity of beauty, writes Lucy Kenningham
Ugliness is subjective. In 1986, the architectural maestros at the Twentieth Century Society slammed the new design of the Great British phone box as “ugly”. Today, the same gang of building nerds is calling for these dirty grey slabs of metal to be bestowed with much-revered listed status, giving them special protection for life.
The only thing that has changed since the C20’s campaign to prevent metal phone boxes from being rolled out on the streets of Britain is the passing of time – 40 years to be precise. With age, accrues status. Having successfully achieved listed status for 3,000 of the traditional red phone booths in the 1980s, the C20 has now identified three of the newer, square-shaped models (the KX100) which “deserve their place in the history books”: one solar-powered specimen in Wales, one scenic booth on the remote northern Scottish island of Lewis and Harris, and one at the heart of the British isles, in Lancashire.
Why now? Well, you may have missed the notifying call, but Britain’s phone booths are being severed from the network as the analogue phone lines in this country are to be axed by 2027 when the “digital switchover” will be complete.
The future of the phone box
It begs the question: what will happen to Britain’s phone booths? Many are already listed. The C20 itself has been instrumental in securing the safeguards for 3,000 of the classic red design (the K6) and a good few of the late 1960s K8 kiosk models.
A campaign run by BT with the cutesy name “Adopt a Kiosk” encourages the repurposing of phone booths. You may have noticed that some prototypes now boast mini libraries. Others house defibrillators and still others contain “miniature art galleries”. In Wiltshire, green-fingered tots have apparently transformed a phone booth into a pop-up plant shop. Use as a toilet is sometimes authorised. Others have become profit-turning bars and cafes.
The most profitable use is advertising, though this has been clamped down on after a 2018 scare about ‘Trojan phone boxes’, a nefarious practice through which companies exploited a loophole in planning regulation that allowed the swift erection of booths. So swift, in fact, that it was cheaper and easier for folk to install them than apply for billboard space. Ironic in a country where choke-tight planning laws have led to an near-irreversible housing crisis. Happily, a Local Government Association campaign, which warned of hazardous booths tripping up pedestrians, managed to get this loophole closed up.
What goes around comes around
It’s hard to imagine a toddler-run plant shop being set up in one of the brutalist KX100s. Indeed, even BT who were responsible for erecting them conceded that they were unpopular with the general public: “popular opinion was that the square shape seemed clinical and that something softer and more rounded would be preferable”.
The society is not immune to the irony of its U-turn. Marshall admits the C20 once viewed the KX100 as the enemy: or in his words, “the slayer of classic red kiosks that we fought so vigorously to repel”. What was once untouchable trash has, it seems, become treasure. “What goes around comes around,” shrugs Oli Marshall, the C20’s campaigns director.
