Phone boxes to stay in storage

Preston’s famous row of red phone boxes will not be lining up again in their longstanding home anytime soon.

The nine iconic booths were removed from Market Street for refurbishment last December – and had been due to be back in place by the spring.

Eight of the cubicles, arranged in pairs, formed the longest line of traditional call boxes in the country – with the ninth standing slightly apart from the others

However, a year on and the engaging, Grade II-listed sight is still absent from alongside the former post office building.

Preston City Council has now said the phone boxes will be kept safely in storage for the foreseeable future – both to protect them from ongoing streetworks in the area, but also to ensure their full potential is dialled up when they do finally make a return.

The authority – which acquired the booths back in 2021 amid concern about their deteriorating condition – said before they were sent away for restoration that it planned to turn them into audio-visual and art displays.  They lost their original purpose more than a decade ago when they were disconnected by BT.

However, the city council has now told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that it is considering installing “data cabling” to the cubicles so they can be used for “a wider variety of art installations”.

It is also concerned that recently-begun renovation work at nearby Amounderness House – the former magistrates’ court building which is being converted into flexible office space – along with upgrades to the public realm on Market Street as part of the city’s ‘Illuminate and Integrate’ project and the planned overhaul of Friargate South, could take the shine off the spiced-up booths if they were reinstalled now.

The authority has not put an exact date on when they will reappear, but a spokesperson said:  “Work is due to start in the spring on pavements around the site…so, for now, to stop them getting dusty and grimy again, they will stay safely locked up.

“Also if they come back empty they will be a magnet for anti-social behaviour.”

The boxes were sent to East Yorkshire for their £80,000 facelift – including an all-important paint job to return them to the vibrant red hue for which they are famed.

The first of the payphones to be installed on Market Street was the one that stands closest to the market itself, a short distance from the eight that make up the record-breaking row.

A booth first appeared in that location in the mid-1930s – in the cream colour that characterised them during that era.   That box was later replaced with the ‘K6’ design, of the types seen elsewhere on the city thoroughfare, with the other facilities introduced at different times through until the 1960s.

Six of the kiosks are adorned with the crowns of George V and George VI – meaning that they must date back to before 1953.

The K6 was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for Preston’s Cenotaph war memorial nearby, and whose father – George Gilbert Scott – designed Preston Town Hall.