Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?
There used to be a phone box at the top of my street. It stood in the middle of a traffic island, near a bin, a lamp-post and a bollard. I never questioned the presence of the phone box, just as I never questioned the presence of the bin, the lamp-post or the bollard. Often, when we passed, my daughter and I would play the phone-box game. I had to stand to one side and pretend to call the phone in the phone box, which didn’t work. She would then pretend to answer, before making a series of further calls in a complicated unfolding of phone-related business that involved making plans, changing plans and then ringing everyone she had just spoken to again to tell them she was going to be late.
It was fun, this game, and it became hard to pass the phone box without playing it. The phone box, to her, was the best kind of toy. It was a real object that no longer worked, and therefore had the gravitas of something adults had once used, but could now be deployed to her own imaginative ends. It also had an extra, loopy charm. A giant phone housed in its own little shelter outside in the middle of the street made absolutely no sense. A phone, to her, was a small, shiny rectangle that lived in my coat pocket. This outdoor cubicle with a handset on a cord and fat, squishy buttons was both hilarious and mysterious, as if it had landed from the sky.
