Some call them ugly ghosts of the graveyard
One man is turning them into a prized possession for Hollywood movies
Not many people live in the village of Carlton Miniott in North Yorkshire England.
In fact the last census shows a population of 990.
Yet it’s famous for a few things such as the Thornborough Henges. If you’re not familiar it’s an ancient structure dating back to around 3500 to 2500 B.C. The site includes three aligned henges that form circles, along with a few burial mounds.
Not too far away, you’ll find The Kilburn White Horse, which is an enormous equine carved into the chalk-like bank of North York Moors National Park. It’s 318 feet long and 220 feet tall.
You’ll also find a graveyard.
But this is not your ordinary graveyard filled with tombstones, mausoleums, or columbarium.
Heck, this graveyard doesn’t even have any dead people buried in it.
However, what it does have is a bunch of phone booths. Well, not a bunch … more like thousands. Perhaps as many as 73,000.
And we’re not talking your ordinary run of the mill phone booths either.
These happen to be cherry red with a striking crown on the top, right above the glass paneled door.
It’s why the graveyard is known as the Red Box Graveyard.
Hello London Calling
You could find them throughout the United Kingdom (UK) … from the roads of Bermuda to Malta, the iconic red telephone booth was everywhere.
Designed and created in 1926 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect who also worked on some of London’s most well-known buildings including Lady Margaret Hall, Cambridge University Library and Guinness Brewery Park.
Initially 1,500 of the red phone booths were placed throughout the streets of London. The first set were known as the K2 edition and chosen by the Royal Fine Arts Commission for outstanding design.
The booths were immediately popular with UK citizens too. Seemed every town and village wanted a red phone booth to sit on one of their street corners.
Except there was a small problem … they weighed over a ton. Needless to say moving them from one place to another was a huge undertaking.
So the General Post Office asked Sir Scott if he could re-design the booth so that it weighed less. And if he could “pretty please” redesign them in time for King George’s Fifth Jubilee Celebration.
Well Sir Scott wasted no time re-creating the phone booths. The new design made the booth 25% lighter. Just what the General Post wanted.
The new K6 booths started showing up on street corners everywhere and by 1935, over 20,000 were in use.
The UK citizens couldn’t get enough of the red booths. By 1985, there were at least 92,000 phone booths placed throughout the UK.
So Ugly My Eyes Hurt
Then something else happened that same year … the mobile phone made its public debut.
Who needs a chunky, expensive, and high-maintenance phone booth when you can make a call with a cell phone that fits in the palm of your hand?
The place to hang out and make a call to a friend of loved one, suddenly the red phone booths were being used less and less. In fact toward the end of 1985, the public was using only about one third of the booths.
Since they weren’t being used, the British Telecom Service stopped servicing the booths. And the numbers continued to dwindle. By the early 2000’s, just about 40,000 actually worked.
And over the years, that number had dropped dramatically. In fact there are only about 2,000 actual working phone booths in the UK.
The rest were completely disabled by the British Telecom Service.
Sadly as more and more booths went unused, they became victims of vandalism. The bright beautiful red booths were overtaken by graffiti.
Since maintenance was no longer being done on the booths, they started showing signs of decay.
Once the beloved beauty of street corners, now the booths were nothing more than an ugly eyesore.
Deemed obsolete, the government made the decision to have all of the non-working booths removed.
Rust in Peace
The government found several abandon lots to place the booths, mostly located in small towns and villages like Carlton Miniott.
The booths are hoisted up onto trucks and then transported to their designated graveyard.
In their final resting place, they lay still, stacked up against one another.
And it’s here they rust away, completely ignored and forgotten by the public that once adored them.
For many, these soulless red booths are nothing more than a bunch of dead telecommunication corpses.
But not everyone sees it this way.
Back From the Dead
At least not Tony Inglis.
A transport engineer and metal scrap expert, Tony was appointed by the UK government to take the booths to their graveyards.
Maybe it was intuition, or he wasn’t ready to say farewell, Tony decided it was worth the time and effort to restore them.
With the help of his staff at Unicorn Restorations, Tony started breathing new life into the red phone booths.
In fact it’s his full-time business.
He restores the once rusted and decaying booths back to their original state of phone beauty. Tony doesn’t miss a detail either.
He returns the booths to mint condition. Each has a cigarette holder and a mirror, along with a framed directly and shelves.
As Tony says, “Pull the chrome handle and step back into your past. Remember the sound of the bells and gongs as your pennies, Sixpences and Shillings dropped? Press button A to talk. Press button B to see your coins return and hear the mechanism whirl as it resets.”
You can buy the K2 Jubilee red box phone booth for 22,500 British pounds (or $27,445 US dollars).
It ships directly to your house, and he’ll even install it for you. But you can only buy one if you’re a UK citizen.
Or unless you’re working on a Hollywood movie.
Hollywood’s Prized Possession
Unicorn Restorations has been supplying street furniture for the entertainment industry for years. And once the industry found out he was restoring the rotted out phone booths to their original state of being, they wanted in.
You can see some of the phone booths Tony has restored in films such as Paddington, Harry Potter, Christopher Robin, Their Finest, and The Little Drummer Girl.
In all, Tony has restored roughly 2,000 phone booths. And he kind of started a trend. Other people are taking to restoring the booths but not exactly the way Tony does.
Many have been turned into street kiosks. Some are made into mini-libraries, coffee, and pastry stations and most notably a cell phone repair shop.
As for the rest of the booths, they’re still in the Red Box Graveyard praying that someone brings them back to life.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“In London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in.”— Paddington Bear
TY Sylvia. It was a lot of fun researching the Red Box Graveyard.
That's really interesting. Thanks, Sandy