Photographer William Arnold spent much of this year in public telephone boxes.
In Defence of Public Telephony
“… Let it ring a long, long, long, long time
If I don’t pick up, hang up, call back, let it ring some more
Oh-oh-oh-oh-ooh-oh
If I don’t pick up, pick up
The sidewinder sleeps, sleeps, sleeps in a coil.”
– Buck, Berry, Mills, Stipe (1992)
Payphones, eh… still there, unused, dying in plain sight, or gone, decommissioned, used fewer than the OFCOM mandated 52 times a year that ensures a reprieve, the city kiosk beaten in and reeking of piss if made of 1980s steel and glass, or stuffed full of Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals paperbacks and sitting like a cute outsize tea caddy on a village green, proudly listed for the nation, because we care about our heritage as long as it harkens to a time when a quarter of the globe was coloured pink.
Personally, I like the KX100 telephone kiosk – the modern ones. I particularly appreciate them in a rural context, the more bucolic or sublime the landscape, the better to juxtapose the cost-efficient, vandal-proof, rust-proof and well-ventilated modular unit. They were designed by David Carter Associates – the people behind the Le Shuttle trains and the Stanley knife. Truly Iconic design heritage.
KX100 near Maraig, North Harris, August 2022 – William Arnold
I could tell you more, if you wanted to know. I am an active member of the KX100 Telephone Kiosk Facebook group, which you should join, but I am not really here to talk to you about street furniture.
Let us spare a moment to consider the actual phone…the comforting hum of a line open for calls — the feeling that somebody… or at least some force a̶u̶t̶o̶m̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ m̶e̶n̶u̶ s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
Seriously though…there were five million calls from BT public telephones in 2022! It is hard to imagine how this can be so but one would assume that whatever those calls were about they must have been important.
When was the last time you used a public telephone for a non-frivolous reason? I’ve been asking this question of people a lot during 2024 — it always seems to be a good conversation starter. Sometimes the stories are amusing.
Generally, the responses range in time from the late 1990s to the end of the 2000s, as one might expect as mobile phone ownership became near-ubiquitous.
My last use of a BT payphone prior to 2022 would have been around 2008 or whenever it was that they finally made 0800 numbers free to call on pay-as-you-go mobile services. A need to complain to Southwest Water without paying 50p a minute required a three-hundred-yard walk to the red K6 near the church in Tywardreath. The inconvenience wasn’t missed and now the kiosk houses not a telephone but local art.
Another lighthouse without a keeper.
The Smithsonian Institution, for preservation purposes apparently categorises obsolete media formats with terms we are more used to using when talking of preserving the natural world…“Endangered, critically endangered…” etc.
The BT payphone, while not a media format as such must surely have entered the arena of endangered technology. Things are not looking good as kiosks are being rapidly removed across the country as the old analogue land-line network is shut down. BT plans to retire the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by January 2027. Payphones never made money even in their heyday; the economic case for scrappage is obvious.
One of the advantages of the old network is that a landline still works in a power cut. Many of those rural kiosks are in areas with poor mobile network coverage and while rarely used have a genuine public safety rationale for their upkeep. OFCOM will likely continue to oblige BT to maintain public telephony facilities in these areas. I hope so.
But what if you simply enjoy the act of walking into a telephone box, picking up the receiver and dialling a call? From the evident nostalgia people have for the kiosks — mostly the red ones, though the 20th Century Society are doing sterling work trying to get some key examples of the KX100 listed — it would seem that more than a few people got something out of this. We are many of us choosing to listen to music on inconvenient black vinyl discs, taking our pictures on expensive reels of plastic, gelatine and silver, even cassette tapes for goodness sake! It is obvious something about a non-screen mediated interaction with a tangible object, that serves one discreet purpose, holds value to at least a significant minority of people.
Let’s go back to that question of frivolity. Who is to say what is frivolous?
In August 2022, I was walking the old ‘postman’s trail’ from Mairaig to Reinigeadale via Urgha in North Harris. Reinigeadale was the last village in the British Isles to be connected to the road network in 1991 and prior to this the post had to be delivered over three miles of hilly track. It’s a moderately challenging walk, especially if you ignore the FOOTPATH CLOSED warnings after the (mostly) abandoned village of Molinginis, and I was running late.
The mobile phone signal was surprisingly OK on the new road back but my aging 2016 iPhone SE had begun doing that thing where 30% battery often turns instantly to 0% if you jab the screen in the wrong way. I wanted to report my whereabouts back to my partner Mollie who was working on some drawings an hour’s drive away in North Bragar, Lewis.
And Lo! The most perfectly pristine example of a 1985-yellow post-privatisation liveried KX100 telephone box came into view. I had 60p in change for a call. It was a no brainer.
Never will you see a more perfectly clean unit. I picked up the receiver…deathly silence…deep disappointment. I sent a text message; the warmth from my pocket had evidently done enough for the iPhone’s charge to hold and the message was received. I however felt genuinely robbed. Robbed of an experience.
Back in North Bragar an email was sent to the BT Payphone team to report the kiosk as faulty. An engineer was promised.
Had the payphone worked that day, I probably wouldn’t be writing this now. I would have gone away satisfied at placing my call.
BT Telephone Kiosks, Isle of Mull 2023 (kiosk at Gruline) – William Arnold 2023
I would not have spent the subsequent summer of 2023 visiting, photographing on Polaroid and attempting to use all twenty-one remaining BT telephone kiosks on the Isle of Mull, of which only five were in fully operable condition.
I almost certainly would not have walked in summer 2024 over 22 miles over two days with a pocket full of 20 pence pieces from Lizard Point to Falmouth via every remaining working phone box enroute, raising some money for Samaritans and making a pretty neat Richard Long homage!
A WALK VIA STANDING PHONES (with apologies to Richard Long) – William Arnold 2024
Times and phone numbers of the kiosks were advertised to my followers on Instagram to call me. Call me they did! People I have never met, friends I had not spoken to in years and my mate Tom, who likes this kind of thing. All of them off the screen, aware of their surroundings and engaging in an actual verbal conversation, some of them for half an hour or more.
This was fun but I do not consider it frivolous.
I think you should give it a go too. Find a kiosk, put the number and a time on your favoured social media platform and see who phones you up!
Placing a call, Zennor, 01376 796920, December 2024
Better still, take 60p for a call – they only count the outgoing ones for the stats, or phone up the operator on 100 to ask the time, like my schoolmate Seth used to do in the 1990s. It was 50-50 whether they told him it was half-past two or directed him to the talking clock.
You can preserve the kiosk. Some of them do look nice, and the defibrillators are useful, but without the telephone it is an object devoid of essence, exuding, like the Sloan family tomb on which Giles Gilbert Scott’s original phone box design was based, a mausoleum’s chill.
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Follow William on Instagram / visit his website.