This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, I'm Sophie Elmhurst and I'm the author of The Last Phone Boxes, Broken Glass, Cider Cairns and

amazingly a Dialtone, which was published in The Guardian Long Read in 2022.

So I started noticing derelict phone boxes in my neighbourhood years ago.

There was one up the road that my daughter, who was very little at the time, loved playing

with. She thought it was this kind of strange and wonderful thing that was on our pavement.

And some of these were the old red kind, some were very ugly, 80s, BT variety.

But all of them seemed pretty unloved and strewn with litter,

and the odd one still and probably worked. And I wonder what they were for, I suppose.

They're the kind of street furniture you barely notice because you're so used to them,

but I was curious about their purpose in an age when we communicate in so many other ways.

So to report the piece, I ended up doing a strange

kind of tour of the country. I went up to the Lake District, a part of the country where

phone boxes actually still serve of a pretty essential purpose, places where you don't get any

phone signal, where there are hikers and people in really remote parts who depend on them if they get

in trouble. And one of the things

that became really clear to me in the process of reporting was how essential that communication

was, particularly to those kind of remote communities. And also that it was more than just a

practical function, the fact that these things still really matter to people, the physicality

of them, the fact that they're these tangible, local, reliable services, just like a

library is in a way. And of course, a bunch of them have been turned into libraries by now.

...