Old British Postoffice Payphone Booth

[tipnring]

Found an old picture I took of an old British metal phone booth. I was repairing a trouble in the pedestal inside the booth. Pretty nice of the people who lived in the house across the road to put it there. You could work on the ped in the rain and not get wet. You can see a British mailbox at the front of their house as well.

[MaximRecoil]

I love those iconic red British phone booths, and I also love being in a phone booth in the rain, which is something I haven't had a chance to do since I was a kid in the early 1980s, which is when our town's only phone booth disappeared. But the phone booth we had in town wasn't anywhere near as impressive as those British ones. It was just the typical Western Electric aluminum and glass with a folding door type, which was the de facto standard here in the United States.

The iconic British ones (K2 and K6) are made of cast iron. The one in your picture is a K6; it's 8' 3" tall and "only" weighs ¾-ton. The K2 is the more impressive of the two; 9' 3" tall, 1¼ tons. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the K6 and the K2:



If I were rich I'd have a K2 on a boat from England immediately, along with the official restoration kit that you can buy from British Telecom, which includes primer, paint, all new laminated glass window panes, pre-painted cast iron brackets for the window panes, and the rivets for the brackets. Then I'd sandblast the entire booth, inside and out, down to bare iron, Bondo any pitting it may have from rust, and give it an automotive-grade paint job. I have no love for British payphones, so I'd probably install a Western Electric 233 payphone in it.

[FABphones]

I love those iconic red British phone booths, and I also love being in a phone booth in the rain, which is something I haven't had a chance to do since I was a kid in the early 1980s...
...But the phone booth we had in town wasn't anywhere near as impressive as those British ones....

Before the days of mobile phones we spent a lot of time in GPO phoneboxes making calls - had much money eaten by the phone when it got stuck, found many phones out of order and remember having to walk in the rain to find the next one, and as a kid we used to get 'the look' by the adults standing in queue outside as their call was always much more important than any call a kid could be making. Some would bang on the window and gesture to us to get out of there. I have thrown many a huly and slammed the phone down on many an ex too. Clunk. 'brrrrr' (that's the sound they would get in their ear afterwards). 

But sadly my biggest memory of the red phonebox is having to stand making a call whilst pushing the door open and keeping it open as all to often they were used as urinals. The smell was horrendous and those doors were really hard to keep open.

For all that they were a lovely design though. I remember when they first started being decommissioned the 'in thing' to do with them was turn them into a shower cubicle. Let's hope they remembered to put them on the ground floor. 

Iconic. Definitely.

[MaximRecoil]

Before the days of mobile phones we spent a lot of time in GPO phoneboxes making calls - had much money eaten by the phone when it got stuck, found many phones out of order and remember having to walk in the rain to find the next one, and as a kid we used to get 'the look' by the adults standing in queue outside as their call was always much more important than any call a kid could be making. Some would bang on the window and gesture to us to get out of there. I have thrown many a huly and slammed the phone down on many an ex too. Clunk. 'brrrrr' (that's the sound they would get in their ear afterwards). 

I never had any problems with payphones eating my money, and rarely encountered one that was out of order. Almost all of them I've used were the modern Western Electric single-slot "Fortress" style which were owned and maintained by the phone company. After the phone booth in my hometown disappeared in the early 1980s (there were still plenty of payphones in town, right up until several years ago, but none were in booths), the only phone booth I ever found was an indoor wooden Western Electric one (like this) in a bowling alley in the late 1990s. That was a nice booth, but unfortunately that place burned down in the early 2000s (and rumor has it that the owner started the fire himself to cash in on the insurance money).

But sadly my biggest memory of the red phonebox is having to stand making a call whilst pushing the door open and keeping it open as all to often they were used as urinals. The smell was horrendous and those doors were really hard to keep open.

Good grief. I'm glad that didn't happen in the phone booth in my small town. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened a lot in cities though. If I owned one it certainly wouldn't be open to the public. 

For all that they were a lovely design though. I remember when they first started being decommissioned the 'in thing' to do with them was turn them into a shower cubicle. Let's hope they remembered to put them on the ground floor. 

That's bizarre. Not much privacy with all those windows. I've seen videos and pictures of them turned into mini libraries and defibrillator stations. That's better than getting rid of them altogether, but I think it's a shame that so many of them have been decommissioned.

[twocvbloke]

I definitely remember them stinking of rotting urine, absolutely disgusting, the later KX series boxes were open around the bottom so you at least got a bit of fresh air coming in, but they still stunk, most of them these days have had the doors removed so they can air out, not that they get used much any more though...

As for memories, even in the 90s I remember using them for calling, but having the operator reverse the charges (no coins on me) so I could call home or something, after the advent of the cheap mobile phone & priceplan, that pretty much ended the need for public phones for me, which given the weewee-stained nature of the phoneboxes, it was a bit of a blessing!!