Mobile Phones 1 – 0 Phone Boxes
Mobile phones are destroying a great British institution! According to the Office of Communications, Britain has more mobile phones than people. There are 70 million mobile phones and 60 million Britons. The use of pay phones has dropped by half in the last three years, according to B.T. They’ve removed about 30,000, or a third of all pay phones from the street since 2002. Of the remaining 61,700 phone boxes, 12,700 are of the archetypal cast iron or wood style.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from the USA Today article which broke this harrowing news:
“It would be a shame if they disappeared,” Londoner John Pearl, 38, says after using his “mobile” — what the Brits call a cellphone — a few steps away from a cluster of the unused phone booths in central London.
“It’s everybody from professional people to celebrities to a guy who saved up three years and wanted one,” says Dockree, 53, who has been in the phone box restoration business for seven years. “There’s no common denominator but a fondness for the red box.”
“The red box is iconic. It’s like big red, double-decker buses, which are dying out too,” says Toby Atkins, 23, a book illustrator in London. “You hate to see them go,” he says after making a call on his mobile.
Tags: society
