One of the things I’ve been pleased about in 2026 is having made time for a bit more reading. Last month, I finally got round to reading ‘The British Phonebox’, which was a present I got for Christmas… in 2021. Time flies.
This is a fantastic book that covers (almost!) everything I could want with regards phone boxes. It even answered a few questions I’d been planning to look into very recently.
Chapter 1 tells a really interesting history of late 19th century public phone boxes after Bell’s introduction of the telephone, leading up to the point when GPO took over (at that time phone boxes were made of wood!). It also foreshadows the Hull exception. I love the stories about the necessity of using a public phone if you were a non-subscriber (apparently sometimes to phone up a random subscriber and bother them – did people have nothing else to do?).
Chapter 2 contains a lot of interesting detail about Giles Gilbert Scott’s inspirations and about the pre-K6 K series, providing lots of places to add to my tourism list 😀 (such as the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, which looks fantastic!).
Chapter 3 is all about the K6 and gives lots of information about how to identify different types and dates for the many examples around the country (I think more than 95% of my collected photos are K6s), using identifiers such as crown type and maker mark.
Chapter 4 gives an account of the post-K6 designs leading into the ’90s with the KX series, and the story of phonecards – though at this point there is no mention of Chargecards, which is what I had as a tween before getting my first mobile (or have, as I still have the card!).
Chapter 5 is all about police boxes and motoring boxes! As a Doctor Who fan I had a good grasp of the former but didn’t previously know anything about the latter. The TARDIS paragraph is fun but I would have liked a quick discussion of the Edinburgh coffee shop police boxes as well, as I find that a really interesting modern-day reuse (and one that can’t really be done with K-series phone boxes as they’re not big enough).
Chapter 6 provides an explanation for the black K6s in London! (Here’s one I photographed on the London Marathon route. Apparently they were licensed by BT to Spectrum Interactive, a phone box competitor.) It also finally mentions the Chargecard, as well as internet kiosks like the street corner one I used while living in student accommodation in 2003-4 (our building was the last University of Edinburgh block not to have internet installed!). In general, it discusses the fall of phone boxes due to mobiles and the introduction of the later KX models.
Chapter 7 includes an incredible story about a new library K6 that was installed in Banbury due to a dispute! It also focuses on phone box reuse, which is a topic close to my heart. Finally, remember those black homage-type phone boxes I’ve been discussing lately? It solves the mystery of those too – these are New World Payphones, one of the many more modern non-BT companies who have installed public phones.
Just a really great book overall, and an excellent reference text for those of us who love phone boxes.
