the is a small junction in a Norfolk village where a red telephone booth stands on a battlefield at the heart of the struggle between an 89-year-old man and a multi-billion-pound multinational corporation. And in the red phone box, evacuating from the wind, there is Derek Harris. Last month he learned that BT (formerly British News) was threatening to close the phone box in the village of Charrington, where he had lived for 50 years when he saw it on the Parish Council agenda. “I thought, ‘I thought I should do something about this,'” Harris said.
He describes it as a “David and Goliath” campaign. It is, and – as revealed in February, this sun-lit but chewing, no longer. We talk about mortality and compromise, heritage and value. I leave with a new sense of how I can feel my true love for inanimate objects and why it is important to have a mission.
But first, some field mice. Charlington is in a picturesque part of the East Anglia countryside. “We are surrounded by open, rolling, wonderful fields – cultivated, beautiful,” says Harris. [of phone lines]. On the other side of the church just above the road is a telegraph pole, inside which three mice nest. ” His eyes glow. The rodents nibbled through the wires, destroying the villagers’ telephone lines and the internet. He says he knows about the mouse because the engineers at OpenReach, a BT-owned company that cares for the network, told him.
Harris is turning his eyes to OpenReach as he has a green junction box connected to a new fibrous cable just a few meters from the phone box. Harris will not take much time to connect the payphone to fiber formation, and like the entire phone network, he will need to upgrade his phone booth to a digital line before the analog network is turned off in 2027. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t connect. Anyway, engineers say they come most weeks.”So maintenance.” [of the phone box] There is no problem. It’s cost-effective.”
The UK has 14,000 working phone booths, down from 20,000 three years ago. At its peak in the 1990s there were 100,000. Of these, approximately 3,000 have iconic red designs. It’s probably strange that phone boxes are surviving at all when around 95% of households have mobile phones.
It is owned and operated by BT and costs millions of pounds each year, so it is requested by regulator Ofcom under the mandate of quaintly named Telephony Universal Services. In the year until May 2020, emergency services were made from telephone booths and 25,000 and 20,000 calls were made to Childline and Samaritans, respectively.
“We have a legal responsibility to ensure that phone booths exist to meet the reasonable needs of UK citizens,” says Katie Hanson, senior consumer policy manager at Ofcom, who was part of a review of the new guidance that was published in 2022. The approach we took is that the boxes we think are essential are protected from removal.”
If the last time in the area (more than 400 meters from another phone box), you cannot remove the phone box if one or more of the following conditions apply: If you’re in an area that doesn’t have coverage for all four mobile network providers, or if you’ve made at least 52 calls in the past year, or if you have a large number of places how hobes hobes hobes in how in hocidens how in hocidents, or if you have high social needs, for example, if you have many calls to helplines such as childline or domestic abuse charities. If the phone booth is the last on the site and none of the other terms apply, and BT wants to remove it, you must start a consultation process with the local government.
Crisis Charities Childline and Samaritans receive thousands of calls from phone booths.
Photo: Sally Anscombe/Getty Images
It is one of the 10 North Norfolk District Council area that was assigned to remove less than 10 calls from Sharrington’s public telephone box last year. The village in the reserve features a 13th century church and Jacobian Manor House. Harris believes that the phone booth is a “symbolic heritage property” and that local MP Steph Aquaron wrote in historic England to list it. “K6 models work rarely,” says Harris. Topped with a golden Tudor crown, the K6 (for kiosk number 6) was designed by Ir Gilbert Scott in 1935 to mark George V’s silver jubilee.
Harris has lived in Charlington for half a century. It was just that he and his late wife raised two children. The phone booth was there longer. Both Harris and K6 share their birth year in 1935. This partially explains his affinity. He spent his childhood in Surrey, near Croydon Airport, enjoying the sight of a plane flying overhead.
“It’s very interesting for a little boy,” he says. “It wasn’t a very good place when the war began, as the airport was the target.” The family took shelter to the south coast, but it wasn’t that safe. German fighter bombers attack the area with a “chip and run” attack. When Harris was about eight years old, he survived such an attack while playing with his brother. “We saw a friend injured. Some were killed.” A few years later, as a young man, Harris joined the Army and was injured. “The outdoor surgeon saved my life,” he says, but he was warned that he would need multiple operations in the coming years and not expect long lifespans (he reminds me a few times in “90th year”).
“I faced death in 2016. It’s still here.”… Harris Councillor Andrew Brown (left).
Photo: Joshu Abright/Guardian
Sharrington’s phone booth also fights previous threats to its life. “They tried to remove it in 2016, but we resisted it well,” says Harris. “I have faced death before and passed through it. I faced death in 2016. It’s still here. Something tells me that it’s meant to stay.” Campaigns to keep it, including Harris and local councillor Andrew Brown, were given an extra month to sue their lawsuit.
“It could be a lifeline and a conservation asset,” Brown says. The area is rural and isolated, with some villagers virtually no mobile signals. North Norfolk has the highest proportion of seniors in the UK and Wales, with adults probably not having a mobile phone. And it has one of the highest percentages of the second home in the country. In an emergency, try knocking on the empty villa door without a mobile signal or work payphone.
He made their point in 2016, Harris said: It wasn’t just a museum piece, people used it. “However, he admits, “probably more of them than they are now.”
Many of the village elders who relied on phone boxes for not having a cell phone have been dead since then, but some older people still use it, Harris claims. If the box survives, one of the handfuls of calls that I logged in in 2025 will be created by me. I lift the receiver and the crackling of dial tones and deep ham go back to the teenage phone and the quick garbled call you had to make before the money runs out. This phone box doesn’t take coins and doesn’t charge me. That’s confusing. You will see that there are some phone booths that don’t allow you to take coins or cards and make free calls to your UK landlines and mobile phones.
It rings the only number you remember without looking at your contact list. He won’t pick it up. Because in this era, who answers unknown landline numbers? So I’m whatsapp to say he rings out of the phone box and says it’s me! We are both temporarily excited about novelty and nostalgia.
Harris admits that mobile phones are everywhere, but he points out that in this part of the country, the signals are rough. “We live next to the quiet Graven Valley, perhaps the most beautiful part of Norfolk, where pure chokestream runs. It’s what attracts ramblers, walkers, lots, and everyone works.” Think if there’s an emergency and your mobile network is down. He says it can happen more and more frequently as you experience extreme weather. “If someone said, ‘If you kept up to that job,’ wouldn’t that be awful? “
It is used in emergencies. “What you need to keep in mind is that some phones made were essential and probably saved someone’s life. It wasn’t that long ago, but there was a snowstorm.” The mobile network is down, and the phone someone made from the phone box was “the only way the rescue came to save this driver, whose car was completely covered in snow. It fell from the top of the hedge in his car and he was trapped.” And not too far is the main road known locally as the Charlington Straight, a rare, straight road that Norfolk’s most reckless drivers tend to speed up. Last year, Harris said: It’s a hot spot for accidents. “
He makes his point for just and practical reasons that he needs to keep a phone box, but this is not the whole story, and when we are talking, we find ourselves out of the cold at a nearby cafe.
“The closer you get to the end, the more you want to see things live. I don’t want to see it die ‘… Derek Harris. Photo: Joshu Abright/Guardian
“Would you like to see the work K6 that BT holds?” asks Harris. He is a good speaker. He distrusts human rights lawyers and misses the day when people respect the police. But he is not all traditionalists. He worked for much of his career in energy savings. I think he likes purpose and order – he dresses perfectly in pressed jeans and shirts, as well as a traditional, untouched overcoat – that may be why he is not keen on the way red phone boxes are being reused in other villages. When BT adopted the kiosk scheme, the phone booth became the home of the library, or defibrillators. Why can’t Sharrington enjoy a new life as such?
“It wasn’t designed for that,” Harris says. “It was designed for communication. Why should it be changed to something else? It’s a telephone kiosk. It’s not a library of sorts or anything.”
Turn it into something else, and it becomes a quirky relic of British history. Another dial tone is dead. As a functional phone booth, “It’s going to be alive, right? So I feel empathy – I feel empathy for what is alive.”
For Harris, that’s personal. Continuity has comfort, which means saving what is worth saving and making the world a better place, or at least not diminishing it. It includes the iconic red telephone box, which works in the village where he lived for a long time. “It’s fighting for something precious, take good care of it,” he says, the more he gets it. The closer you get to the end, the more you want to see things live. I don’t want to see it die. That’s how you put it. That’s what I’m fighting for. “
