The end of BT Phone Booths in Wiltshire?

[Graham G3ZVT]

Of course David was talking about HF not VHF, Imagine asking your contact to stop waffling on about his microfono dinamico, and call our associazione automobilistica instead.

[Malcolm T]

A shame really, a useful piece of kit from time to time , and you could see a red phone box from a great distance , unlike the transparent ones .
TOO easy to rob and destroy by yobs , some years ago there was a pair of fellas going around with Oxy Acetylene cylinders in the back seat of a car and cutting open the money boxes.

[arjoll]

There are still payphones in NZ - they're convenient places for Spark to put access points for the 1 GB/day free wifi that cellphone users get No idea how much use they'd get as actual phones, but obviously there's enough for Spark to be bothered.

In terms of looks, some local examples are here and here.

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by stitch1

I thought there was a box near me but it’s gone, I had to check on google maps that it did exist, I didn’t notice it had been removed.

They were just booths so not much use for anything else, I don’t suppose there’s any left now.
I have a collection of Mercury and Cable & Wireless phone cards, worthless but nice to keep.

A bit like ghost signs Mercury manhole covers can be seen in many city centres, the ducting will still be used.

John

Here is my unused Mercury phonecard(£5) i actually bought it as it was a presentation phonecard for the Startrek Generations Film with a special folder .

Since the start of this thread I have been taking more notice of phone boxes, my memory survey is about 50% libraries, 30% defibrillators (sometimes combined with a library) and 20% with real phones in them, you need a card of some sort for those. One was empty and vandalised. All of those where the proper red cast iron jobs (K7?). Only spotted one "modern" doorless type and that was, fairly obviously by eye and nose, a urinal.

[Dave Moll]

Every time I come across a 'phone box while walking, I look inside to check whether it still has a 'phone installed. If it does, I then go in, lift the handset and check for a dial tone.

What I haven't tended to do so far is to retain statistics.

What I do recall a couple of years back was needing a public telephone in Llanberis (north Wales), walking the length of the town and finding two repurposed boxes and one simply stripped of its contents. I had to travel most of he way to Caernarfon before I found one I could use. Fortunately, I had my car with me, as it would have been a very long way to walk!

[G6Tanuki]

1980s/1990s Ordnance Survey™ maps have the locations of phone-booths [and post-offices] marked. I've got a slew of these - predominantly for the rural western parts of England/Wales from my car-rally days - it's kinda fun when revisiting such places to look on the map for phones/post-offices and try to spot where they once were.

In reality, they're these days about as useful as roadside-mileposts and trig-points.

Somewhere I've still got my AA-member roadside-phone-point key [the kind with the square head] but it's really not part of my must-carry-in-the-car stuff these days.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Somewhere I've still got my AA-member roadside-phone-point key [the kind with the square head] but it's really not part of my must-carry-in-the-car stuff these days.

... and even if you did carry it, you are unlikely to find it of use on encountering any of the preserved AA boxes. The ones I have visited had had the original cylinder locks changed to mortice locks.

[KeithsTV]

But if you visit the Avoncroft Building Museum near Bromsgrove they have a display of working phone boxes including several AA and RAC boxes and my RAC key opened most of those on display. The first time I've used it in over 40 years!

There's also a working telephone exchange on site.

Keith

[Dave Moll]

I must admit I'd never tried my AA key at Avoncroft. I'll have to dig it out and take it with me next time I visit.

[David G4EBT]

I'll leave it to the judgement of the moderators as to whether this should be posted.

Phone boxes have been problematical for years in that for the most part, they're only used for drug deals.

Police in Hull are negotiating with KCOM - the local phone provider - to have them removed from the city centre. The one outside McDonalds is used extensively, and like others, is littered with evidence. Paradoxically, as BT and KCOM can only remove a phone box if they can satisfy Ofcom that their is no social need to retain it, the more that they're used for drug deals, the more it will seem to justify retention based on call volume.

I can't see why BT/KCOM don't restrict the phones to only enable free 999 emergency and 111 (non-emergency) calls to be made.

https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news...candal-1500288

This isn't just in Hull - it's country-wide.

A phone box in The Meadows district of Nottingham is the busiest of 479 payphones in Nottinghamshire - used to make 3,000 calls a year. There are 12,000 phone boxes in the UK where less than one call a month is made whereas a 'drug payphone' averages eight calls a day. BT had said that 'it believed the high number of calls made from the phone box could be down to tourism'. (The Meadows is most certainly not a tourist district!).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-45586222

Not just England - Wales too. EG: Caernarfon Post Office phone box:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-...wales-45019763

BT struck a deal to replace 1,000 payphones in cities across the UK with ‘LinkUK’ kiosks, hundreds of which have already been installed nationwide. These kiosks provide users with access to free services, including up to 1Gbps Wi-Fi, USB charging ports, a touchscreen tablet for accessing maps, directions and local services, and free calls to UK landline and mobile phones. The cost of the services is funded by adverts screened on two 55 inch HD digital displays. Police have intervened to stop the London Borough of Tower Hamlets granting permission to install any further kiosks, preventing the installation of eight additional machines, after evidence of how they were being used emerged:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-eng...for-drug-deals

I mention this not to make comments on a societal topic that doesn't belong on this forum, but that public phone boxes - valuable though they were in yesteryear - rather than provide a public service, for some years now have become magnets for anti-social and criminal behaviour. Like the long since removed AA and RAC boxes, they're a thing of the past and belong in museums and history books - not city centres.

[electronicskip]

Or in Peoples gardens as it seems to be the in thing to have one at the moment.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by David G4EBT

...they're a thing of the past and belong in museums and history books - not city centres...

We do have an excellent little museum in Fakenham, England's only preserved town gasworks, but it only opens in the warmer months and just for one or two days a week. Not much help for anyone needing a phone...

On the other hand, we also have a police station with a nice large courtyard in front of it. Perhaps a box situated there might maintain an amenity while discouraging the wrong sort of clientele?

Paul

[KeithsTV]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

I must admit I'd never tried my AA key at Avoncroft. I'll have to dig it out and take it with me next time I visit.

When we went to Avoncroft we were talking with one of the volunteers who worked in the phone box area and he encouraged me to try my key. I think he was ex BT. All the BT phone boxes are connected to the small working exchange and you can call between the phone boxes using the coins provided and even press button B if you want to!

Keith

[electronicskip]

Judging by the rapidly shrinking size of the BT phone book we had delivered yesterday i would say that traditional land lines will be a thing of the past in the not to distant future.
I went to replace the old phone book with the new one and i saw it was even thinner than the last one , also i noticed id never even unwrapped the previous book!

[Station X]

That's because most people are ex-directory these days.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Station X

That's because most people are ex-directory these days.

It also reflects the move to mobiles. Most people I know only have a 'landline number' because they still need a landline for broadband. The idea of actually plugging a real phone into the microfilter would never occur to them!

It's ages since I saw a BT phone-book; the last ones here (along with a Yellow Pages - remember them?) were used a decade ago as a monitor-support, a function now taken over by a similarly-disused 1990s Philips CD-player.

Another similarly-extinct thing: Payphones in pubs. At one time most pubs had an 'acoustic hood' with a wall mounted BT payphone in it - then the payphone became a standalone unit that sat on the bar (I remember Southwestern Bell was a popular 1980s brand for these). The inevitable background noise in a pub made trying to use such a payphone a challenging experience.