‘Ugly’ phone boxes should go, says think tank

Obsolete phone boxes that blight UK streets should be easier to remove by updating existing laws and providing new powers to city councils, says the research group Create Streets.

With the widespread use of mobile phones, traditional phone booths have become outdated. Calls from phone boxes in the UK have declined 99.5 percent from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only 4 million in 2021-22.

In the report, Box Blight, the think tank claims that phone companies are not providing telephone services either but selling advertising, and that many are now used as free Wi-Fi hubs, allowing companies to collect and sell data and provide targeted advertising.

The paper identifies how in one central London study of 64 phone boxes, four had been repurposed, 27 were in a poor state of repair externally (graffiti, missing panels, etc), 25 were not operational and of these 14 were both in a poor condition and not operational. Only half were in a good state of repair and over 40 percent were no use to anyone.

“While essential and historic phone boxes are rightly protected, our city streets are littered with ugly phone boxes that are long past their sell by date,” said Tom Noble, Senior Urban Designer at Create Streets and report author. “Unfortunately, the laws regulating their presence on our streets have been slow to catch up; councils simply don’t have the power to enforce removal and what limited powers they have are onerous, consuming too much time and resources.”

The paper draws on the London Borough of Camden’s experience which has campaigned against the blight of phone boxes and played a key role in lobbying changes in existing laws.

Council officers, working with a planning barrister, researched ways of using existing legal powers to compel telcos to remove unused booths. These included the use of Closure Notices under antisocial behaviour laws, planning enforcement powers and Breach of Condition Notices. The council’s work has now become a template for other city authorities to emulate.

The report sets out in detail the existing legal options and process for removing telephone boxes in order to help share best practice and makes six specific recommendations to ‘banish box blight’.

Nicholas Boys Smith, founding Chair of Create Streets commented: “Box blight is a menace hiding in plain sight, attracting litter, cluttering up our pavements and making all our streets and squares a little bit uglier and less pleasant. Our paper sets out practical steps that the new [national] government can take now to make our streets and town centres better and more prosperous.”

Image: Create Streets