In a charming English village, old red telephone boxes, once a proud symbol of Britain’s telecommunications history, now stand forgotten and rusty. Painted a bright cherry red and crowned with a distinctive emblem, these iconic booths were once everywhere in the British Commonwealth.
These public telephone boxes used to line the streets across the UK, light up the roads of Bermuda and Malta, and stand tall on Gibraltar’s corners. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, they were stylish, easy to spot, and much loved by the public. By the 1980s, there were over 73,000 of them in use.
Like many once cutting-edge technologies, telephone boxes quickly became outdated, expensive, and cumbersome. By 1985, they had fallen out of favor and were considered more trouble than they were worth, leading to their removal from city streets.
However, these iconic boxes found new homes thanks to fans who couldn’t bear to see them go to waste. People repurposed them in creative ways, turning them into shower stalls, mini libraries, and art projects. Those that weren’t given new life ended up in rural storage areas, left to rust in messy stacks as the elements faded their once-vibrant cherry red paint.
One such rural “graveyard” is the small village of Carlton Miniott in northern England. Here, at the Carlton Service Station, hundreds of decommissioned phone boxes lie in various stages of decay. As one of the many dumping grounds for these boxes that weren’t repurposed by artists or enthusiasts, these telecommunications relics are destined to eventually be recycled.
