A new calling

PHONE boxes once epitomised telecommunications for the masses. Now they are in sharp decline. Only 3% of Britons used one to make a phone call in the past month, according to BT, the country’s biggest telecoms firm. Calls have fallen by over 85% in the last five years. In rural areas over 12,000 booths are used for less than one call a month. Over 70% are losing money. Numbers have dropped from a record 92,000 in 2002, to 60,000 now.

So they serve other functions, some sleazy: as pinboards for prostitutes, as impromptu urinals or as drug-dealers’ dens. But spare street fixtures with electricity and phone connections can have more wholesome uses. Some have become wifi hotspots, gadget-charging stations and cash machines, or art galleries, tourist information centres and book exchanges. Others are fitted with defibrillators. One near Cambridge was a tiny pub for a night. A firm called X2 Connect exports them: a Saudi buyer turned one into a shower; another client made a cocktail cabinet.

Payphone kiosks in other countries are falling out of fashion too, though not all have the cachet of Britain’s cast-iron models. France Telecom has removed almost 100,000 since 2000 but received no offers to buy them, though a few pristine models do serve as props for period films. Telekom Austria has converted 30 booths into charging stations for electric cars as a trial, as the country phases them out. In Japan an art group called Kingyobu (goldfish club) has turned some kiosks in Osaka into aquariums. The New Museum, in New York City, converted 5,000 disused payphones into time portals. Passers-by could lift the receivers and hear the recollections of nurses, actors and porn stars from 1993.

Rachel Haot, the city’s chief digital officer, hopes its public phones (about 11,000, down from 35,000 in the 1990s) will become “more than street furniture”. But, at least in the Big Apple, they are still seen as useful in emergencies. In 2012 Hurricane Sandy knocked out a quarter of mobile transmission sites; payphone usage tripled in areas without power. Entries for Reinvent Payphones, a design contest, proposed touchscreens with interactive maps and information puddles projected onto pavements. The only condition was that users could still place calls from them.