We’re still in Leeds town centre, and today we’re looking at a rather handsome row of four red phone boxes in City Square.
(Coordinates 53°79’64.9″N, 1°54’79.3″W.)
Each of the phone boxes is very well preserved, so clearly Leeds city council have put some work into these ones.
They frame the restaurant building very nicely!
Join us again next week for more Leeds phone boxes.
Update August 2022: added coordinates.
As I’ve been in a bookshelf place this week, what with getting my own ones back up and running, I thought I’d share my favourite of Mum and Dad’s many bookshelves: the one in the dining room that used to be an escape of mine when I was a kid.
This is where Mum keeps all her old childhood books from the ’50s. I was a voracious reader when I was little, and I would scour the whole house for new books to read (there are a lot), but this was one of my favourite spots to spend a Sunday afternoon. I’d pick out something that sounded interesting, and nine times out of ten it would be a jolly-hockey-sticks romp about maverick English boarding school girls in the ’50s. It was a world that was completely far removed from my own, but I found it fascinating, and those books later inspired one of my own characters in one of my ongoing novel series. I would settle down in the chair next to the bookshelf, so that once I was done with one book, I could immediately grab another.
Other books on the shelf included the entire Little Women series (published as four books in the UK – Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys – I must have read them twenty or thirty times), Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass, and the entire What Katy Did series. Some real classics there, and I still borrow them from time to time.
We move on this week to a series of red phone boxes around Leeds town centre.
(Coordinates 53°79’58.2″N, 1°54’05.5″W.)
Um, ignore the banana skin.
I like to see phone boxes that have been turned into cash machines – it means they’re still useful in the 21st century and councils are less likely to get rid of them!
Update July 2022: added coordinates.
Update May 2024: it now has Asterix illustrations on the other side!
Today’s phone box is one that was exported across the Atlantic! It stands outside the Elephant & Castle British-themed pub in Toronto, Canada.
(Coordinates 43°64’74.5″N, 79°38’61.9″W.)
This is how it looks from the top of the CN Tower:
Can you spot it?
Back to the UK next week.
Update June 2022: added coordinates.
Update January 2026: still looking good!
Update April 2026: still there 😀
I’ve rhapsodised about this album already when I reviewed it for my Now! review series, but I thought it’d be nice to share some pictures of the actual artefact.
What I love about vinyl*, especially on pop compilations of this era, is that when you open up the sleeve, you get a big colourful display like this:
As a kid, I spent hours poring over these pictures and captions while listening to this record. Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé looking all operatic! Fat Boys and their scary snake picture! Bananarama and their topless dude friends! Jan Hammer and that dusky Miami sky! Carole Decker’s hair (#goals several decades before #goals was a thing)! Pet Shop Boys and their moody black ‘n’ white road photo! Richard Coles long before he was a vicar! But best of all was Billy Idol and his black leather jacket, which basically set in stone what ‘cool’ looked like for me. I love this record sleeve. It’s one of my favourite things in Mum and Dad’s house.
*I’m not actually a vinyl person, really, although I do intend to get a proper record player at some point – Geth’s dad still has a bunch of Geth’s old vinyl (or did last time we checked) that Geth wants back (or did last time I checked), and obviously I intend to keep stuff like Now! #10 when my parents no longer want it. Because it was always Dad who put records on for me when I was little, it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learnt to use a record player, and I always found lining up the needle a bit fiddly and was nervous about scratching the record. Nevertheless, I persisted, because it’s an important 20th century skill – even if I often ended up with the record starting a few seconds into track 1 because of overcompensating after that time I lined it up too far the other way and the needle went skidding off the edge of the record. I wasn’t a particularly competent teenager.
Today’s phone box is the one that stands on the platform at Durham railway station.
(Coordinates 54°77’93.5″N, 1°58’17.1″W.)
Living in the North East, I see this phone box a lot – every time I travel south by rail. This is what it looks like from the train:
It’s nice to see it every time I go through Durham!
Update June 2022: added coordinates.
Yup, it’s a classic.
We definitely used to have two Sony Walkmen, but I’m not sure what happened to the other one. The one you can see me listening to in the picture for the Now! #34 review from summer 1996 is, I think, the same one as pictured here. I have a vague memory of the other one not working very well, which means it’s probably long gone. This one is a survivor, though, and is still happily hanging about.
It’s the final one of the three red phone boxes that line the Grassmarket:
Like most phone boxes in the centre of Edinburgh, it’s mainly used as a useful advertising space for club nights and so on, but the box itself is still in good condition.
(Coordinates 55°94’71.7″N, 3°19’68.4″W.)
That’s us finally done with Edinburgh phone boxes on Burns Night 2016! I’ll have something completely different for you next week.
It’s another phone box from the Grassmarket on that sunny January day in 2016.
(Coordinates 55°94’75.4″N, 3°19’54.1″W.)
It’s looking a little worse for wear with the smashed panels, but that’s fairly standard for phone boxes on boozy thoroughfares like the Grassmarket. All in all, it’s doing pretty well.
More from the Grassmarket next week!
Update June 2022: added coordinates.
This poster has been in the house for as long as I can remember…
…which makes sense, given that the exhibition took place a few months before I was born. The poster used to hang on the wall, but as Mum and Dad’s book collection has expanded, that wall space has been taken over by bookshelves, hence the poster being moved to the window shutters.
Given that the big work project I just finished a couple of weeks ago was on the subject of art in Edinburgh, I’m interested to see that the Talbot Rice gallery has been going for some time. No Edinburgh Art Festival back then, either – it all seems to have been under the banner of the International Festival.
I’ve always liked this poster – the black leaves are really pretty, and remind me of the numerous houseplants we used to have in the family home before they all died. The ’80s lettering on the poster is just a bonus!