Who uses phone boxes?

I noticed that an red old phone box had disappeared from Brighton's North Laines when I was down there recently. Hopefully it's just been taken away while they're renovating the pub it stood next to, and will eventually return.
When BT started replacing red phone boxes with the new aluminium ones, there was something of an outcry - even though the doors were too heavy to open for most people (especially if carrying shopping) they were something of an icon.

But I have to say that if I ever see anyone using a phone box these days I find it a bit odd, and you can't help making a social judgement. Back in the 70s when it was still quite rare to have a phone in your home, using the phone at the corner of the street was seen as something of a statement of your poverty, and I remember we (who for some reason had a phone) would often host a neighbour who wanted to make a call but didn't want to be seen making a call - certainly not in a phone box. So they'd come round, call someone, then leave 10p by the side of the phone, exchange some pleasantries, and go...

Making a phone call was something of a social event, uniting not just the caller and the person on the other end of the phone, but neighbours as well.

But only until having a phone became the norm. (It wasn't so much the expense in those days, though it wasn't cheap; we were only allowed to use the phone in certain special circumstances. More importantly, I think, was the hassle - having a phone installed, renting the equipment, deciding where it went, applying for a number, the bureaucracy...)

This is an example of what our Level 2 set text this semester, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, refers to as 'social technology', something that creates its own set of practices, body of knowledge and mini culture. The mobile phone was the same - I held out for a while before I got one, but was still the first person in my circle of friends to have one (a big bugger it was, too). That was 1998 if memory serves, bit it was over a year before I discovered the 'SMS' option - what was the point of that, I wondered. So I tried it, and sent a message to a friend who, days later, figured out why her phone had beeped at her. We really couldn't see why you would need to send a text message to someone when you could just phone them...

No one had the knowledge, or the culture, at that time to make use of the technology and in fact the technology wasn't even seen by the phone companies as anything special. But practices developed and, in this case, led the technology and the service on offer.

It's important to get things the right way around when thinking about this: yesterday in the seminar someone said that mass and cheap public transport had allowed people to travel and go snowboarding. True enough, but it's wrong to think there was a pent-up demand for snowboarding that was suddenly released when cheap flights became available. Instead it's probably fairer to say that people who travelled wondered what to do when they got there, started trying new things that they saw others doing, and then the 'service' followed. An expensive one at first, pioneered by those who could afford it.

But again, as with texting, don't think that the companies that offered snowboarding holidays did it out of the goodness of their hearts - it's in their interests to encourage it because it allows their business to grow. When you've saturated the market with all the skiers a country can produce you need to either offer something new to your existing customers, or find new customers who don't get turned on by your existing product (look up the Ansoff Matrix for more on this).

So the 'mini culture' becomes a 'mass culture' (or at least a less-than-mini one).
By promoting snow boarding in terms of a life style that certain types of people would want to aspire to, it changes from either the preserve of the few, or the thing to do when you get bored of skiing, in to the reason you go away in the first place. (See the consumer life cycle, or Innovation Curve, for more on this pattern)

All of which rambling was supposed to be a brief intro to this article from BBC News. If you visit the original page you can read comments made by readers.

Payphone use has halved in three years, says BT, mainly due to mobile phones. So who still uses them?
Few features of British life are so loved, yet so neglected, as the phone box.

A red "K6" - the 1930s design that inspires such national affection - lies empty on St Giles Street in Oxford, despite the lunchtime bustle around it.

Behind the iconic red door, a Pepsi cup and a discarded four-day-old receipt are the only evidence of conversations past.

Like the 16th Century St John's College just yards away, this monument to British design is part of the nation's history. But does it also still have a social function?

They're quite handy, but I prefer my mobile
Sam Richardson
On the evidence of an unscientific, 30-minute survey on this particular day, it would appear not. And BT has its doubts too.
There are now more mobile phones in use in the UK - 70 million, says watchdog Ofcom - than there are individuals, although poor network coverage prevents some people in remote areas from having one.

BT has removed more than 30,000 under-used kiosks since 2002 but two-thirds of the 61,700 payphones remaining are unprofitable, it says. So who still uses them?

The answer can be found a five-minute walk away on Cornmarket Street, one of Oxford's main shopping areas, where eight BT payphones - one boasting e-mail and text facilities - get a trickle of customers in the afternoon.

These are not the traditional kiosks so loved, but the maligned boxes introduced in the 1980s, with no door and no privacy. But at least they have demand.

BIRTH OF A BRITISH ICON
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott wins a Post Office commission in 1926 for new telephone kiosks
His K2 is loved for its domed roof and rectangular panes
This design is adapted for the K6, mass-produced in 1935
John Timpson, former Today presenter, writes Requiem for a Red Box in 1989
Banksy puts an axe through one to parody their decline
There are about 2,779 Scott-inspired red boxes still listed

Acle Canakci, 19, has been trying to call her mother in Turkey to tell her about her new life as a language student in Oxford. She has a mobile but uses the public phone about once a week to ring home because it's cheaper and she lives with a family and can't use their landline.
She didn't get through this time because, she suspects, her mother's telephone battery is low. Usually the call lasts about 30 minutes and a £5 phonecard can keep her going for a few weeks.

"These phones are still important because it's not only the English that live here," she says. "A lot of people in the world come here, travelling or to study, and they need public telephone boxes.

"Of course, I need them too. I know they're not very private but nobody can understand what I'm talking about in my language anyway."

Coin jams

Although the eight boxes in Cornmarket St have periods as long as 20 minutes without any custom at all, most of the callers that do use them are foreign visitors or workers.

Jorge Sanchez, 17, is learning how to call his sister in Argentina, Frenchman Lionel Chan Hu Theng is talking to his sister in Nottingham, while Pedro Alves is engaged in the very British tradition of phone rage.

"Before I put in £2 but only spent 60 pence and it didn't give me any change," says Mr Alves, 31, who works in a restaurant and is showing his mother how to ring Portugal.
"I tried to complain and they go to an answer machine so there's no person to speak to. It's very frustrating."

But there is "native" custom too. Sam Richardson, a teenage gardener, uses a payphone for social calls when the credit on his pay-as-you-go mobile runs out.

Sales rep David Antony, 60, is what one may describe as a heavy user. But he says foreign coins jam up as many as half the payphones.

"It takes about three days for BT to fix them but this isn't the only tourist town in the country, BT should be onto this.

"I use them about six times a day for work. I don't like mobiles because I'm not sure they know enough about the electronics and the damage they do. And they are far too expensive still - BT does reasonably priced telephone calls."

Smashed panes

Especially if you stay on the line for the full 20 minutes on a 40 pence call, like teaching assistant Miss Spencer, 40. She recently lost her mobile but is adjusting happily to life without it.

"I wanted to speak to my sister before she went to a meeting. We forget that we managed to get hold of people and conduct our business without mobiles."
In those days, there would be long queues outside phone boxes and irritation mounted as people spent too long on the phone. Not any more.

An hour spent outside four of Oxford's red phone boxes bears witness to zero use, which suggests their more ugly, younger siblings of the 1980s have the best locations.

The oldest phone box in the city is a rare K2 - the classic 1920s design by Giles Gilbert Scott - and rather fittingly, it is located in the ancient heart of the city at the crossroads Quadrifurcus, more commonly known as Carfax.

Much like the Routemaster bus, the red phone box is associated with an age of innocence, despite the vandalism, the prostitutes' calling cards and the urinating that blighted it.
Unlike its nemesis, the mobile phone, a call made in an old phone box is private, whatever the street chaos outside its four walls. Nowadays, a train carriage can sound rather like a phone box filled with a dozen people.

But there is nothing innocent about this phone box in Carfax, in the shadow of the 13th Century tower of the former St Martin's Church.

Its panes have been smashed and the floor is littered with rubbish and glass. According to staff at the nearly deli it has been like that for at least a week.

A Chinese teenager who wants to call her mother in Beijing opens the door, takes one look at the mess and decides against it.
But a group of French students are undeterred. They just want a photograph of themselves crammed inside, saying the red phone boxes they see on television are a "symbol of Britain", like the red bus or black taxi.

Maybe this is a glimpse of its future, its only function a photo opportunity.