Do they want to preserve the real thing as it was or some glorified abstract of it?

Of course one or two should remain but people don't use these anymore. If they all remained they would just be used as makeshift urinals and for addicts shooting up.

In my own country we didn't have the ads (one can simply advertise such services in the paper) but we did have torn phonebooks, smokey booths and often destroyed phones.

"To this day, it is still likely the highest-charting song entirely about a public phone box."

https://www.thek6project.co.uk/2022/08/30/meols-merseyside-c...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/omd-telephone-box

You can get a refurbished K6 for about £3000, absolute bargain if you ask me!

https://www.x2connect.com/

  - someone told me about a fish—n-chip buffet in Arbroath, Scotland
  - I told my team, one of them asked “just fish?”
  - I replied “batter fried pizza too”
  - one of them made the inevitable comment about defibrillators
  - I pointed out many of these red kiosks have been repurposed to hold defibrillators and went looking for images

I remember having fun as a kid placing a reverse charge call from one phone booth to another across the street. Apparently the operator didn't have a way of knowing the number you were asking to make a call to was a phone booth, so your buddy across the street answers the operators call and graciously agrees to accept the reverse charge call (which is then free - no need to put any money in).

I guess it's one downside of dematerialisation with digital tech - I can't think of a single thing that would make sense. Everyone's got their own virtual portal to all the new technologies that come out, there's not much to look at out in the world.

Maybe as more progress happens in physical 'world of atoms' type things we'll see a bit of this come back.

The crowns are also ground off I think

https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxcGDAc8Dv924zkv8

(It's art: https://secretldn.com/telephone-box-installation-kingston/)

OSM has extensive tagging scheme for phone booths: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtelephone

The operation timed out when attempting to contact www.thek6project.co.uk.

They provide a lifeline to women fleeing domestic abuse, who need to contact services without their phone being tracked. Also to homeless and other vulnerable people who may not have access to a phone.

Statistics show lots of calls to emergency services, centrelink (Australia's welfare agency) etc...

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/cabina-inglesa-donde-menos-te-...

Yes, i suppose i am saying 'nostalgia is not what it once was' go figure.

But anyway. Phone boxes were shit. Often literally. Depending on where you were, they often stank of human waste of one form or another, and even in a time before fear of contagion, you were still reticent to hold that manky ear piece too close to your ear. The ones in london were plastered in pornography from the local people trafficers.

A phone box was somewhere that you went as a last resort. Or, judging by the smell in most of them, if you needed a piss.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/zLRxTFUXErcsrkCi7