What Happened to the Iconic British Red Telephone Box? 

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In the US, the phone booth was most famously the place Clark Kent would duck into to emerge as Superman. This was in the early comic books. By the time the Christopher Reeve movie came out, most phone "booths" had been replaced by zero-privacy open consoles, to discourage vandalism. The movie even had had a joking reference to the booth's demise.

About 10 years ago, I purchased a phone box (K6) and spent the best part of a year restoring it. It now sits proudly on display in my garden. Great video, as always.

The last red booth I used was in Soho, London. The interior smelt faintly of wee and was covered in ladies of the night business cards.

A nice surprise, Paul. Brought back so many memories. As a cub scout, I had to prove I could use a phone box for some badge or other by ringing up Akela. That was back in the pre-decimal days and 'push button B' phones - nightmare! And then, a few years later, there I was teaching my kids to use public phones. But, in such a short time, our kids from my second marriage have no idea what a phone box is! The last time I used a public phone was in a service station on the M6, more than 20 years ago. My girlfriend of the time had just got her first mobile, and I had to ring her to tell her I'd be late. Mobiles cost the earth to ring from public phones then, and she'd put a long answer phone message on her new phone. I actually ran out of 20p coins before I could leave a message!! And, inevitably, I got into trouble for not just being late, but for not letting her know...

I remember in about 1991, my car (Austin Mini) broke down, and I had to walk about a mile to get to a phone box to call my dad, and I only had one ten pence piece!! . Great days.

Apparently the vandles worked out that you could stick a car jack between the phone and the coin box, then crank it until the coin boxes fasters snapped. That's why BT started putting those thick pressed metal "Ramp" topped enclosures around the coin box. You could usually tell if someone had nicked the box on one of them in a rank of phone boxes, as people would be waiting outside to use this one rather than using the other ones, because the coin you put in for your call would just fall straight through. People would be putting the same 50p in over and over again to call up friends and family in other countries. :D

Now I thought you may have given the infamous K2 police box.. Aka the Tardis, an honoury mention. Great vid Paul - hope your well 👍

There are plenty of K6 phone boxes around Hull and Beverly in East Yorkshire, all painted cream. This is because the Hull Corporation telephone company was not taken over by the GPO. It still exists today as Kingston Communications

G'day Paul, Thanks so much for this video. I'm an Australian in my late 60s and I can vividly remember our phone boxes which, like the famous British ones were red and, like yours, they were everywhere. I think some of them even had the Queen's crown, but I could be wrong. The phone boxes were managed by the Post Master General's department (PMG) which, as the name suggests, was also our Post Office system. They were also in charge of installing and laying cables for business and domestic telephones. Like the UK; as time passed our phone boxes went through some truly ugly iterations until, today, those that one can find can range from a mere glass and metal covering for the phone and the top half of its 'customers', to the fully glass enclosed version; all lacking in any form of attractive or practical design. On my first trip to the UK, many years ago the King George phone boxes were still about in some abundance and I really liked their design and functionality. As an historian, I think they are important to preserve as much as possible as they mark a time in our technological history when local, national and international communication were, eventually, available to anyone with a sufficient amount of coins. Also, being a tiny bit of a Luddite, I like them because they made phone calls and nothing else. As handy as my smartphone can be, if I want to use it as such, I generally use my handheld phone as a telephone; that for me is pretty amazing enough when I recall that a telephone was a large Bakelite instrument on a table in the front hallway, or something similar sitting in a tiny 'building' out in the street. I would dearly love to purchase one but unless I win lotto that's not going to happen. It is so good to see that there are some of your countrymen and women who cherish the classic red 'telephone kiosk' and are doing their best to keep them in your landscape. Thanks again, Paul. Cheers Bill H.

My favorite channel, never once have I seen this channel have a negative connotation or having said a bad word, I particularly like the day in the life video. Easy to digest and understand, and a huge array of topics, and immense amount of research and preparation into each video, thank you so much, I very much appreciate the huge effort to bring us all you have.

At first I thought this seemed more like a subject of historical curiosity rather than technology. I forgot just how necessary phone booths were before cell phones and that most the people alive now have probably never used one. Like all technologies, their form follows their purpose, but their aesthics will be distinct to their designer's culture. The people who make these artifacts may not even realize it, but they really do put something of themselves into what they make.

As a holder for defib machines, has to be one of the greatest uses of phone boxes. I like the library idea too, as mobile libraries are pretty much no longer a thing.

Distressingly, in the metropolitan centers for the most part, they devolved into _pissoirs_ before finally being removed at the advent of the cell/mobile phone.

This makes me think of the payphone banks at the airports here in the us. There would be a wall with 10-20 payphones next to each other. Each time I visited the local airport there would be fewer and fewer phones there until they finally got rid of them all and repurposed the space.

Loved the video. How about a segment on the oldest pubs still active in the Uk? I’ve been to a few while visiting and I’m always amazed at the history of those old pubs. Sloped floors, slanted roofs but the doors still open and the beer still flowing.

I think the defib is probably the best idea. Plus i've seen several in London that are free WiFi access points too. Recently EE has started doing a trial of putting mmwave 5G antennas on them.

When I refitted my bathroom a few years ago, I decided I wanted a converted phone box as a shower cubicle. These were available at the time in both K6 and K8 versions although they were very expensive and heavy! A compromise more within my price range was a basic aluminium shower cubicle that I sprayed with red 'rattle can' car paint, and added a 'Pull' sticker near the door handle and stuck two perspex reproduction 'Telephone' signs at the top of the glass. Quite effective!

In Australia, we used to have very similar red phone boxes. I fondly remember using them as a kid for shelter when it was raining! They've long since been transformed into the door-less open booths, with sides that only start about 3ft off the ground. I looked inside one a few weeks ago, and found it was 100% FREE for national calls, including to mobile phones. I guess it's less costly to give free calls than to have drivers going around collecting the cash, and to repair the damage from thieves trying to steal the money from them.

I seem to recall that those phone boxes that are adopted by communities are also still supplied with electricity, paid for by BT, because it would cost more to disconnect the supply than it costs (BT pays a flat rate for all electricity used by phones boxes). This makes them ideal homes for defibrillators, too.

If you are concerned about communicating after a 'natural' disaster strikes, probably the best option is to have fiber to the home and a backup power source. A lot of home communications gear can run off of 12V, however we just don't setup enough gear with the backup battery option. Then there are options like having a long run UPS setup for your communications gear all the way out to having solar panels and a battery system for your home that can allow your home to run with no grid power. If you want to get into how the phone system works, if you have copper going somewhere, it usually goes to a humming box on the corner and then back to the CO (central office) via fiber. So while phone companies claim they will drive out their utility trucks to these boxes and recharge the batteries in them for the piles of them they have around town after doing major staff reductions, I think these assurances are highly suspect. So yeah, even if they did make that phone booth work, which they probably don't because nobody makes the communications gear to talk to them anymore and the copper to the CO where the old gear used to reside was cut long ago, it wouldn't work anyway. As mentioned above your best bet is to have the fiber run to your home and supply power to it during a power outage. The next best option is to have Starlink. Granted Starlink does not have a backup Internet only plan at the present time, for $100 / mo you can have a receiver and switch over to it when land based communications go down. Maybe if you have an RV, you spend the extra $25 / mo for the new mobile feature and have it double as your ISP when you are out and about in your RV. If you are curious, I did once find a public phone that was listed as "in service" according to a staff member of the facility I found it in, but she also mentioned it didn't work. What I found is they did seem to have it hooked up to a modern VRAD, which allowed it to have dial tone, but the VRAD didn't know how to actually talk to the pay phone, so you couldn't really use it to make calls; only hear dial tone telling you that it had a carrier signal. I found it in a regional welcome center run by the state. Apparently the state had the phone account on its books and never got around to taking it off, so the phone company never disconnected it. Seeing it wasn't actually used, the phone company got away with leaving it in a dysfunctional state and if they were ever asked about it, they could say that it had dial tone, so they were "supporting" it. The things you get when the state and phone company are both involved.

Thank you Curious Droid for this video. A video on a somewhat lighter subject is often delicious to watch. The phone box also had some negative sides. Mainly, the queues I often had to endure outside the box, waiting for other customers to call, when raining. Sometimes I was forced to listen to silly arguments told by people that were screaming out loud. Or being engaged on out-of-district phone calls that overextended, and I had to terminate the call ignominiously saying "sorry I ran out of coins", which sounded like an offence when at the other side of the call there was the girlfriend. In the '80s, I called home from work at lunchtime from a phone box; by driving less than a mile, I crossed the district boundary - so the phone call cost me few pennies instead of few pounds. One thing I recall clearly, a feeling of strong displeasure when the cabins were vandalised, in some situations it was a tragedy. Phone boxes were so essential; in a way young people can't imagine today. Thank you again, for the trip down the memory lane, very appreciated...

I'm old enough to remember the comforting warm glow of a k6 on a wet winter evening. Phoning my dad to pick me up because I'd missed the last bus home. Putting in 20p and the click of the rotary dial. Those days are long gone now.

More memories flooding back as I read the comments. The smell! No, not urine, well not all the time... but those boxes had a smell all of their own. Not an unpleasant one, and probably mostly down to people smoking in them, but it was the same smell everywhere. Then there were the phone books (if they hadn't been ripped out) - they were stored upsidedown in large metal clips. So you had to swing the whole book up and then open it (only to discover - inevitably - that it was out of date!). And lastly, the doors. They had a strange closing mechanism - they didn't slam or click shut, but they always shut securely. There was some sort of spring mechanism which stopped the door slamming, but then ensured it closed slowly and properly. I haven't thought about that in years! I took it for granted then, but now I'd love to know how it worked.

In the US, phone booths are very rare. In rural Pennsylvania there is a amusement park named Knoebels where there were four 1960s-1970's Bell phone booths. Parents would drag their kids to the phone booths to take pictures, like they were standing next to the Queen's Jewels. The children were always confused.

Quite a similar story in Canada (and most other places these days, I'd think). Born in the mid 70s, I saw phone booths everywhere. Ours certainly weren't as iconic looking as those in the UK, but like there, they were just a common fixture. Now, I couldn't even tell you where a single one exists, if they even exist at all anymore. For all the reasons you covered though, it only makes sense that they'd be gone now.

As well as phone booths dissapearing I don't know how long it's been since I was in a pub and the pub phone rang and the bartender called someone in the pub and said it's for you I wouldn't be surprised if it was about 25 years

When I was in Sweden 🇸🇪 their phone booths are still there but theirs no phones in America my old high school had a pay phone in the back near the cafeteria and they just recently took it down

In an episode of Futurama they believed that the Telephone Box in the past was used as a public toilet. Not far fetched actually.

Great to see another video from you. I hope you are well. I love your variety of short documentaries, from Apollo to phone boxes. Absolutely fascinating. Im 31 and remember using a phone box to call my mates in 2010 when i run out of credit on my mobile. Also called 0800 numbers in phone boxes before they were made free on mobiles. Take care and i look forward to your next video.

Glad to see you back and hope you are keeping well 👍🏻

Good to see you back Paul, hope you are well and thanks for this video.

What a wonderful script Paul! Thank you and have a great day!

Was born in the midlands in 86 and I sorta remember these, although the BT branded ones that were made from glass with vinyl stickers over them were getting more common and were the standard by the time I was in junior school in 1994.

I would like to see a similar article on the phones used inside the booths... fascinating stuff, thank you Paul!

Quite a nice little video. Well done, sir!

I was amazed and happy. when I visited a few years ago, to see so many Red Boxes around London, even though many didn't have phones in them (most were wifi and charging stations). I saw more pay phones there than here in the States. I was able to use a couple of the public WiFis for VoIP calls I had to make near Victoria Station. Thank you, Brits!

This is why we can’t have nice things! I’m a Canadian and remember having toll phones without the iconic measures. There’s a certain bit of nostalgia associated with ours as well. I just lost dependence on them when I could afford a mobile phone. The city basically took the stations out for the same reasons. Vandalism and illicit opiate sales. When the ends no longer justify the means, I can’t blame anyone for putting their finances on the line for the sake of nostalgia. Well done!

I havent seen one of your videos lately but i love them. Going to have to go back and see what I've missed. Your shirt collection must be quite large by now! I'm sure many people would agree.. we'll watch anything you make on most likely any subject because you do a great job.

Excellent video Paul and you're looking well!

I work In Gibraltar where they have several old red phone boxes of various types. Same with postboxes too. They’re quite a tourist magnet.

I find it kinda crazy that some supermarkets still have payphones; the Morrisons store closest to me still has a payphone next to an ATM! and it's still plugged into power and the phone line!...

What a cool video. I am American so I can't speak to the nostalgia of the red ones. I do remember being young and what people called back then, a "computer geek". I got into pay phone "phreaking" for a while. The story of Captain Crunch was already legendary by then but we had a lot of fun coming up with small electronic devices to "phreak" pay phones. That's the other thing. We always called the pay phones instead of phone booths. By then, the early 80s, most of them were not booths anymore but free standing kiosks mounted on a sturdy pole or on a wall. They might have had a small overhang but a lot of them were just a black and chrome phone bolted to the wall.

great job Paul!!!

Glad to see you again!

Great video as always.

Congratulations on one million subscribers!

Just after the ball dropped in Times Square on New Years 1975, four of us took refuge in a phone booth to escape the stampede of people leaving at the same time. They always show you the crowd gathering to watch the ball drop during the day but they don't show you what happens about a minute after when everyone realizes at the same time there is no reason to be there anymore. I cannot stress enough that is something to remove from your bucket list. Phone booths were very iconic in movies back in the day but the British Red Telephone Box was the best.

Fond memories of using the red phone box as a convenient shelter in a howling gale or heavy downpour, as long as the glass was intact and it hadn't been used as a convenience!

I love that your channel post videos about ICBMs well as British phone booth history

Does this mean that without the phone box, the days of call girl calling cards are well and truly over? I most certainly remember growing up as a kid the dozens of phone boxes on Charing Cross Road and the West End filled to the brim with boobies! I remember the rage when the "new BT phone box" was introduced in the mid 90s and the public outrage. Living in the sticks now, it's nice to see that they've been repurposed into defibrillator spots.

I can smell this video. The look may be recognisable globally, but if you ever used one, it's the smell that sticks with you

Thanks Paul another very interesting and informative piece 👍 👏 keep up the great work sir

ALLO ALLO From Across The Pond In Ohio! As kids, me and my siblings loved playing in phone booths and who amongst us wouldn't stop and reach into the coin return to see IF we got lucky😅 Once technology got going I'm pretty sure we ALL knew the Phone Booth was headed towards T-REX Country! Very much enjoyed this presentation! I'm one of The Curious Droid Cult who come to see The Shirt...and stay for the content!

In Brazil we had the famous "Orelhões" (translated as "Big Ears"), they were still around until the early 2010's, then they vanished one by one and even became free-of-charge for its last couple of years. The last one I've saw was in my college campus in 2019.

I walked past a working phone box (of the iconic design) only this afternoon, on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, UK.

Last year we were wiped out by a long-track EF4 tornado that also completely ruined the cellular infrastructure. A man even died from a heart attack because he couldn’t reach emergency services. Though it took a week to restore power, we actually got upgraded cellular service almost right away. You see, Verizon had not enabled 5G coverage in our area but they were already building it out. When the tornado destroyed the LTE infrastructure they moved a bunch of mobile cellular stations into the area and flipped the switch on the dormant 5G network. The nearby high school damaged but became a base of operations for water, food, etc. Within a day or two Verizon had a row of emergency booths at there with places for people to charge their phones and make other calls. I believe some of the mobile cellular stations were operating there too for LTE and to relay with surrounding 5G antennas.

Thank you for the great video 🙂

A follow-up about American phone booths would be nice. I've heard there's only one left working; somewhere in the southwest. I was surprised at how many were still left in the UK. I thought the number would be much smaller.

Those in the neighborhood where I grew up in the 70s would get chopped up by juvenile vandals as soon as the phone installers left the site. Not even security cameras would stop them. Today I most often see them in airports where I presume the watchful eyes of airport security personnel keeps the juveniles at bay. I was in Akihabara recently (Tokyo's electronics district) on one of my trips and saw several brand new phone booths on busy street corners sporting signs that said "Free Wi-Fi" inside. A case where modern and old coexist in harmony. The presence of many foreigners without roaming set up on their non-Japanese cellphones probably accounts for this.

A scrapman in Gateshead, JJ Stanley, had hundreds of these in a yard near to the A1 & Metrocentre a few years ago

Very informative and interesting video, Thanks

The last working one I saw was in West Virginia near the Green Bank radio observatory. That is a radio and cell phone dead zone to not interfere with the radio telescope.

Beautiful video, Paul. Yes, they are a Nostalgic Icon of The U.K.

Ah! Paul delivers, once more, on the promise to make any and all topic interesting. Phone boxes faded from my memory at exactly the rate they faded from the landscape. Never though about them again. But yes, they obviously had a development history as well as a decommission history. At some point a rather large number of people did nothing but drive around and check if boxes needed repairs... what are they doing now?

Missed you, man!

In Hull, the local phone network was managed independently from the national network so the K6s were painted cream instead of red

Nice batik shirt! And a well presented topic as usual.

This was an unexpected video that bought back a memory from 1970, My good lady and son and I had just moved into our first home. Baby number three was due any time. I was awoke by a severe nudge from my Lady. I think I've started says she, to which I replied 'that's nice' wallop I'm up and running to the local telephone booth. Only too find that all that is left is the back panel and roof, for some reason the phone did not work, I'm off to find another phone to call for the ambulance. All went well in the end. Jump forward to 2016, we are driving around the old homestead area and relating the story to our oldest child and new husband. As we approach the location of the old phone both and the climax of the tail we find the phone both in the same condition as forty years ago. priceless! Thanks for bringing that Back.

For me, the LACK of public telephones (as well as excessive charges for barely used landlines) is what finally convinced me to pony up for a cell phone after not wanting one for a very long time. In the US public telephone boxes had completely disappeared at least a decade ago. The few you still see on the streets are not hooked up and have simply been abandoned. It is really a shame. Because modern cell phones break easily and there have been many times I wished there was a public phone.

Really enjoyed that slice of history.

Great choice of topic, which I wouldn't have been able to come up with myself

I helped a friend buy one at an auction in Wellington, NZ in a Telecom sell off. He got one at a bargain and I helped transport it to his house, down the path to the bottom garden, for use as a tool shed. It's on a hill and is still quite a feature to this day.

There was a phone booth in an antique store (may have been a reproduction) that I seriously considered buying. It would look perfect in the corner of a living room 🙃

Best video yet!

The phone box or booth in the US didn't have quite the historical value as the lovely British ones, i still reminisce of the simpler times of my youth. Man I miss it! Glad I was a part of that generation and time. What we had a ton of here were pay phones. While I don't think I would use one today other than for nostalgia, I miss seeing them. Cellphones were nill, no social media, no internet, kids played outside and had to be back home in time for dinner. Yup, good stuff!

Paul is such a box of surprises, he doesn't remotely look his age, can suddenly wear the most eye piercing shirts and now you're telling me he likes making edm? What.

Along with the phone booths being removed in the US we also had Motorist Aid call boxes on the interstate highways with buttons you could push for fire, police, or vehicle brake down. You don't see them anymore either.

"It would only ever ring when he was in the bath" the most British way to justify not having a phone.

Love that you call the Elizabeth Tower, "Big Ben", the bell that chimes the hour and is very rarely seen.

Your research for this iconic item is great. Didn't know or recognize that there were different models. When I was working over there in GB, my co-worker at the time bought one so He could take it back to the US. Hate to see them slowly disappear.

Paul has the skill to make pleasant even the promotional material

There’s a wonderful video on RU-vid of someone replicating a miniatures of the phone boxes. I believe there’s a video of the blue version, Which went viral. As a pattern maker, machinist, and now metrologist…. Im somewhat accustomed to working with precision daily. I was impressed with their build quality!!

Thank you Paul

Ah yes, the phone booth. The most important function to me was to prank call people. Good times!

What I remember as a kid is the door being sooo hard to open. Back then there were 2p and 10p slots. Hardly anyone would have a "spare" 10p when pocket money was about 20p a week. You could buy 6 blackjacks (chewy aniseed sweets) for a penny. We got a phone at home when I was about 8. It was rationed and you had to join the queue and wait your turn (like the NHS today), which was some weeks. I was very proud when we had a phone number. It felt like we mattered!

I live in Upper Austria, and imagine my surprise when we visited the spa town of Bad Ischl and spotted two red K6 telephone boxes next to each other, right in the centre of town. One of them is home to a community library, and the other has an actual telephone inside it!

The way you talk about 20th century telephone booths I couldn't help thinking of Rimmer from Red Dwarf going on about 20th century telegraph poles

The town next to mine had one of these while I was growing up (I live in the US), it lasted a long time, even after most of the US ones were removed. Eventually it went away though.

Very interesing video. I don't think I have ever seen one of those in the United States here, but they are super cool. Thank you for the video.

As a french, i was more than happy to find a "red box" in the Highlands, in the middle of nowhere, long time ago. More recently, during a trip to London, i searched desperately for one and ... nothing. That was quite a disappointment.

Reminds me that last September I took a vacation driving from North Carolina to Florida that when I stopped at the Florida rest stop/visitor center they had a pay phone that felt like such nostalgia and novelty that I had to take a photo of it.

Recently Telstra made calls to Australian telephone numbers free of charge at all their remaining public pay phones. I suspect it’s more cost effective to give away telephone calls than bothering with the hassle of emptying coins.

I saw many in down town Bologna Italy in about 2014ish. I was quite happy to see and touch one.

love your channel and your distinct shirts bell has been on over a year now and I appreciate your health update a while ago and by all means please take your time because your content is always worth the wait I have a 2 part question... Have you always wore shirts like that or did you just start that style for these videos and where do you find your shirts? love from Milwaukee Wisconsin USA!

I didn't know that I needed to learn the history of British phone boxes. But now I do.

The red phone box in Walesby, Lincolnshire is now the local lending library... Brilliant!

Nostalgia is subtle but but can have a powerful pull.

The Tardis was camouflaged as a phone box so they could park it anywhere and it wouldn't look out of place. These days not so much so. Probably turn up in an antique boutique after getting pinched the same afternoon

Anyone else remember the brief flourishing of Mercury phone boxes back in the day?