It’s another phone box from the London Marathon route!
(Coordinates 51°48’63.1″N, 0°01’62.4″E.)
This is another nice example of a K2 – it really brightens up the Greenwich streets. Difficult for councils to keep all those small panes intact though!
It’s the second of the London Marathon phone boxes!
(Coordinates 51°48’57.9″N, 0°06’28.2″E.)
Apologies that this one is very blurry – there was a water station in the way and I was trying to zoom in while still semi-running! You can see it much more clearly in the Google Street View image linked above.
It’s a bulbous-topped K2, like many of the phone boxes you see on London streets!
It’s the first of the London Marathon phone boxes! I warn you that we’ll be here in London for about the next four or five months. I took a LOT of phone box photos while running the London Marathon.
(Coordinates 51°48’02.5″N, 0°05’25.7″E.)
This phone box showed up around the two-mile marker. It’s a bit vandalised and overgrown, but that’s fairly standard for a suburban phone box – it’s difficult for councils to keep on top of maintaining them. Still a welcome sight early in the race!
This is the last of the batch of phone boxes that Mum and Dad found in Dumfries and Galloway earlier this year.
(Coordinates 54°91’10.6″N, 4°46’47.3″W.)
This box is out of use nowadays, but it’s still very well kept by the local council. Maybe they’re planning to find an alternative use for it at some point!
BONUS PHONE BOX NEWS FOR THIS WEEK: As of today you have 26 days left to watch Dial ‘B’ for Britain: The Story of the Landline on iPlayer. It’s a fascinating history of telephones in 20th century Britain, which is of course one of my favourite subjects! I highly recommend it if you’re at all interested in phones or engineering or British culture, or even if you just remember the 20th century and fancy a bit of nostalgia.
We’ll be heading down to London next week for the first of my London Marathon phone box finds!
Another phone box that Mum and Dad found in the south-west of Scotland! The nice thing about rural places is that the local councils are more likely to maintain their phone boxes.
(Coordinates 54°85’80.0″N, 4°46’17.0″W.)
This box is no longer working – there’s a notice inside that explains that BT no longer own it (hence why the phone equipment has been removed) and it’s now the property of the local council. Wonder if they have alternative plans for it?
Again, the Google Street View cars have not visited Dumfries and Galloway for a decade and so the link above shows the box in a much more overgrown situation – they’ve since tidied the location up!
Here’s another phone box that Mum and Dad found in the south-west of Scotland. This one still works!
(Coordinates 54°76’95.2″N, 4°94’12.2″W.)
I’m not sure what the blue bit of rope is for, but on the whole this is a very nicely kept phone box. Interestingly, it doesn’t accept coins, only card payments:
It also accepts BT Chargecards. I still have mine, though I’m probably one of the few remaining people in the UK who does! I’m not sure that Mum and Dad would appreciate me charging a phone call to their bill with my Chargecard nowadays.
It’s interesting that even this still-working phone box has been modernised in some respect though. I wonder how many are out there that still accept coins?
Update May 2023: now with added menu!
This is another phone box found by Mum and Dad.
(Coordinates 54°98’40.4″N, 3°19’94.1″W.)
As you can probably tell from the decade-old date of the Google Street View image linked above (which is becoming a bit of a theme), this is another phone box from Dumfries and Galloway. It needs a bit of love (hopefully it’ll get adopted and repurposed at some point), but at least it’s still standing.
More from the area next week!
This is another phone box spotted by Mum and Dad while out and about in Dumfries and Galloway.
(Coordinates 54°98’55.2″N, 3°34’69.2″W.)
This is one of a number of countryside phone boxes that have been turned into defibrillator boxes – useful for places in the middle of nowhere where it takes longer for the emergency services to arrive.
Again, the Google Street View image linked above is ten years out of date (maybe the Google cars will visit Dumfries and Galloway again one day…), which shows us that this phone box was previously one of the many that were upgraded (in the early ’00s from what I remember) to an email/text/phone box – which are themselves fairly obsolete now that everyone has email/internet on their mobile!
Update November 2021: it’s now green!
Further update July 2025: it’s now a different shade of green!
Here’s another phone box spotted by Mum and Dad in Dumfries and Galloway.
(Coordinates 55°00’50.0″N, 3°42’26.6″W.)
This one is an interestingly-repurposed box that at some point in the last decade (as usual for Dumfries and Galloway, the Google Street View image linked above is from 2009) has been turned into a book repository!
More from the area next week.
I still have a few more phone boxes from Mum and Dad’s travels to share before I move onto my London Marathon ones. Here’s another one from Dumfriesshire.
(Coordinates 54°84’87.0″N, 4°26’41.5″W.)
This one is an abandoned husk that’s being slowly overgrown by plants. Sad but beautiful!