Video: The second life of English telephone booths
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Black tea with lemon, double-decker buses and red telephone booths - imagine Great Britain without these "attributes" it is simply impossible. However, despite the conservatism of the British, iconic telephone machines are today under threat of extinction. Mobile phones and the Internet have become so commonplace that the need for street vending machines is gradually disappearing, but British Telecom has come up with a creative solution to save the historic face of English cities. Through the efforts of the company, many telephone booths have been converted into … libraries!
Ten years ago, there were about 92,000 payphones on British streets, today there are only half of them. Thousands of red booths were dismantled as unnecessary, despite the fact that in many cities and villages they were perceived as an integral part of the architectural ensemble. Many Britons are outraged that the place of the once flaunted machine guns is now empty, the streets without them are literally orphaned.
To preserve the remaining red telephone booths, British Telecom launched the Adopt a kiosk program in 2009. For a nominal fee of £ 1, anyone could "re-equip" a telephone booth at will. For three years, more than 1500 machines have been turned into art galleries, cafes and exhibitions of florists, grocery stores, and the most popular was their transformation into … a library.
The principle of work of improvised libraries is akin to bookcrossing: anyone can take a book for reading or a DVD with a movie that they would like to watch. In return, the reader leaves any other book, magazine or DVD, thus, the number of books remains unchanged, and the fund is constantly updated.
Recall that red telephone booths have appeared on British streets since the 1920s, over the decades they have become a real symbol of English culture, and today caring people are making efforts to breathe new life into them. Perhaps, in terms of their originality, the automata-libraries are comparable to the Italian vineyard-library Bookyard, which we wrote about on our website Culturology.ru earlier.
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