In Italy the telephone booths now in disuse are removed. The few survivors remain on the street as a reminder of times gone by without passers-by paying too much attention to them. In the UK the famous ones red phone booths, which have always been considered and experienced as a real national symbol, are instead reborn to new life, becoming museums, libraries or even places to place defibrillators to be used in an emergency.
BT, a British telecommunications company and former state monopolist has announced that 4.000 telephone boxes across the UK are up for sale in symbolic figures and purchasable by anyone who wants to reuse them by giving them a new function. Since 2008, over 6.600 cabins have been sold to local communities for £XNUMX through the scheme Adopt a Kiosk.
Each community has transformed them as it sees fit: they have become history museums, art galleries, small shops, places to exchange books. The first telephone box library was established in Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset in 2009 after the local council cut funding for the area's mobile library. The parish council bought the cabins and the inhabitants donated their books, creating real libraries scattered around the town. Art galleries with pictures instead of payphones have sprung up in Cheltenham, while the Community Hertbeat Trust has had the idea of reconvert the cabins and use them for sanitary purposes. Hundreds of defibrillators have been placed inside them, which the insiders have at their disposal and can use in case of emergency. "The diffusion of smartphones and the ever-widening telephone coverage present even in rural areas has prompted us to rationalize the number of payphones we have," James Browne, manager of BT, told The Times. “The Adopt a Kiosk project enables UK communities to keep their red telephone box, giving it a new purpose.”
