Company says it is to remove 20,000 booths, many of which are rarely if ever used for their intended purpose

A much-loved but almost obsolete feature is set to vanish from thousands of British streets when BT presses button B to cancel calls in 20,000 phone boxes - a reference that would have to be explained to an entire digital generation which has never made a call from a public phone.

Faced with soaring maintenance costs and plummeting usage, BT plans to scrap half of the UK’s remaining public telephone boxes, many of which are now never used for their original purpose.

The phone boxes were once lifelines to the wider world at a time when many homes had no landline and the very idea of a mobile phone came from the wilder shores of science fiction. Today many are the sad and smelly last resting places of pigeons and half-eaten chicken takeaways, or worse.

Some 33,000 calls a day are still made from phone boxes, but about a third are only used once a month, and many are never used at all. Of those in more regular use, few earn enough money to cover maintenance costs.

The number of calls has been dropping by 20% a year, while the cost of cleaning, replacing broken glass panels, repairing vandalised receivers and removing graffiti and rubbish has risen steadily to about £6m a year.

“BT is committed to providing a public payphone service, but with usage declining by over 90% in the last decade, we continue to review and remove payphones which are no longer used,” a spokeswoman said.



The boxes would only be removed according to Ofcom guidelines, she said. If there is no other payphone within 400 metres, the local authority must be notified, and the box would only be removed if there were no objections.

Many of those that will survive the cull are traditional red cast iron boxes, 2,400 of which are Grade II listed buildings. The most famous design, cherished by collectors when they are decommissioned, is the K6 kiosk, created in 1935 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and inspired, bizarrely, by a tomb in Old St Pancras churchyard created by the Georgian architect Sir John Soane in 1816 to mark his wife’s grave.

At their peak there were 92,000 payphones across the UK, and queues in the street were a familiar sight at the busiest ones, where those impatient for their turn rapped indignantly on the glass to rebuke chatty callers.

BT is encouraging communities to reprieve some of those now condemned by paying £1 to adopt them so that they might join the 4,300 that have found new lives as tiny libraries, art centres, sites for lifesaving defibrillation equipment and, as in a particularly thrilling Archers plot line, local information points.

The cost of using a public phone box was measured out in old copper pennies for decades. T0day the minimum charge is 60p, which includes a 40p connection charge, and would be enough to pay for many calls and texts from most mobile phones.

