Yup, we’re still on Upper Street (aka. the A1) in Islington, which is a great street for phone boxes!
(Coordinates 51°53’49.0″N, 0°10’45.4″W.)
This one is a K2 model rather than a K6 – you can tell by the more bulbous top. As ever, the Wikipedia page has some good pictures illustrating the differences.
Love those autumn leaves too!
Update 5th February 2026: added coordinate link.
It’s another of my series of Islington phone boxes.
(Coordinates 51°53’43.3″N, 0°10’50.1″W.)
This one is just a few metres down from last week’s phone box – the two of them flank a sofa shop. Very pretty, even in the November rain.
Update 5th February 2026: added coordinate link, but in the process I discovered that this phone box has sadly been removed 🙁 (at some point between July 2019 and November 2020 according to Street View).
We move on today to a series of Islington phone boxes from November 2016.
(Coordinates 51°53’40.8″N, 0°10’52.3″W.)
Geth and I have been going to London in November for a few years in a row, due to the Beat:Cancer charity gig taking place at Slimelight. Unfortunately, we’ll be giving it a miss this year, as we already have too many gigs going on in the autumn. As such, I will have to wait until the London Marathon in April before I can start collecting pictures of London phone boxes again!
In the meantime, I have a lot of them to show you. Stay tuned for the next few weeks for more Islington examples.
Update 5th February 2026: added coordinate link.
Um…
I know what you’re thinking – that’s not a phone box. What happened was that for the third phone box in Shap, we were driving too fast for me to snap the photo properly, and on this occasion, Dad wasn’t able to stop the car.
Luckily, Google Street View comes to the rescue!
(Coordinates 54°53’29.6″N, 2°67’82.3″W.)
That’s a wrap in Shap. We’ll be somewhere else next week!
Update May 2023: added Street View link.
For Christmas 1989, I got my first globe as a present. Super educational!
However, you don’t have to be a specialist historian to be aware that 1989 was a bit of a transitional year in world politics, to put it mildly, and so unfortunately my poor little globe was already out of date by the time I got it!
Here it is today (yes, obviously I still have it), complete with its depiction of the USSR and two separate Germanies:
Perhaps so that I would have an up-to-date globe (that is not at all true – it was so that I would have a desk lamp for my homework), Mum and Dad then bought me this light-up globe lamp (labelled 1992) in the early ’90s:
Obviously the 1992 globe is now itself slightly outdated (as you can see, it’s only got one Sudan – see this Wikipedia list for more examples), but for grown-up me as a 20th century throwback, that’s part of its charm.
I’ve occasionally considered starting a collection of even earlier 20th century globes, but given current constraints on house space, that’s probably not a good idea.
Maybe when I’m a very old lady, I’ll get an up-to-date one just to see how much has changed over the course of my lifetime!
Today we’re looking at the second of the three Shap phone boxes.
(Coordinates 54°52’59.3″N, 2°67’44.9″W.)
Judging by the sign, this is (or at least was at some point) a modified phone box facility with a basic computer for email purposes. There used to be one of those at the bottom of Sciennes, Edinburgh, which I used a lot when I was living in the Sciennes student flats (which were the ONE block of university flats that hadn’t had internet put in by 2003). The Sciennes one was a KX series box, but it’s good to see that the classic K6s were at least temporarily used for this purpose as well.
We finish our Shap stop next week.
Update May 2023: added Street View link.
Today we go back a little in the chronology of my phone box collection and look at the first of a series of three red phone boxes in Shap, Cumbria.
(Coordinates 54°52’06.3″N, 2°67’07.1″W.)
This first one is pretty dilapidated, but I think it’s weathered beautifully. Not sure if that lacy material is being hung up to dry or is just some rubbish that has caught in the broken window in a very aesthetically pleasing way!
More from Shap next week.
Update September 2022: added a Street View link.
Back to Durham today for a couple of phone boxes in the centre of town.
(Coordinates 54°77’76.2″N, 1°57’47.4″W.)
Bit of a blurry photo today, I’m afraid, as we were in a hurry to get back to the train station and I could only take a photo from a distance. Next time I’m in Durham I’ll try and remember to take one from close up!
Update August 2022: added coordinates.
Update May 2023: finally took a non-blurry picture, but it’s down to a single phone box now!
I’ve blogged before about my replica GPO 746 landline phone. It’s a good replica, but nothing beats the feel of dialling on the real deal. This black version, which sits on Mum and Dad’s hall table and has done since before I was born, is the real deal.
It came with the house when Mum and Dad bought it in 1982, so we assume it dates from the ’70s. It still works fine. In fact, there have been times when the house has had a power cut, and because of the way that phone is connected up, it still works despite the power cut. My brother and I discovered this once when housesitting/catsitting for Mum and Dad and trying to find a way to order pizza while the electric company were digging something up on the other side of the street.
There have been a couple of hall tables in that spot while our family has lived there, but only ever one phone. Good old black 746.
Today our wander around Leeds town centre takes us to this modified phone box on Bishopgate Street.
(Coordinates 53°79’59.2″N, 1°54’69.6″W.)
AQL are a telecommunications company, but I’m not sure if they’ve taken over this box for any purposes other than advertising. Either way, it looks very nice with its blue coat of paint, rather like the Wetherspoon phone box from Waverley Bridge in Edinburgh.
That’s us done with Leeds for now. Somewhere new next week!
Update August 2022: added coordinates.