Telephone box register
Posted: 12 May 2021, 19:33
About 18 months ago, my good friend Rex passed away whilst volunteering at Wallingford station.
Rex and I had known each other for some years as we had founded the Kenavon Railway Society, initially to campaign (unsuccessfully) to have a fireless loco cosmetically restored and returned to Reading.
At Rex's funeral, I was told of another of Rex's campaigns - for the retention of public telephones. Apparently he would frequently take a bus into deepest Oxfordshire, get off when he found a phone box, check it worked, and write to BT if it didn't!
After Rex died, I wanted to take on the administration of the Kenavon Railway Society website, so I advised BT Community Webkit of his passing and asked them to pass the site over to me, which they did, along with two others of which I was unaware. One of these was for his Campaign for the Retention of Payphones (CARP). Initially I preserved these two websites in aspic in Rex's memory, and concentrated on the Kenavon site, however earlier this year BT advised me that they would be withdrawing the community webkit and the sites would need to be relocated.
I had no real desire to continue Rex's campaign about telephone boxes, partly owing to lack of time and partly because it's somewhat of a lost cause, but I wished to retain the site in some way to honour his memory. So I have transferred much of Rex's material to a new site https://standingrichard.wixsite.com/phone-box-register, which I intend to use as a photographic register of phone boxes.
Whilst I'm aware of a few phone boxes in my locality which haven't made it onto the website (which I intend to photograph and add), obviously there are a lot I'm either not aware of or are too far away for me to photograph in current circumstances. So, if you have any phone boxes in your locality (red K6 in particular, but any type will do, including TARDISes!), or come across any on your travels, please email me a photo (or share the photo to my Facebook page where I can download it) with a note of:
* Its location
* Its condition (in use, disused, in an alternative use as a defibrillator station/book exchange/artwork etc)
* A Google link to its location
Many thanks
Rex and I had known each other for some years as we had founded the Kenavon Railway Society, initially to campaign (unsuccessfully) to have a fireless loco cosmetically restored and returned to Reading.
At Rex's funeral, I was told of another of Rex's campaigns - for the retention of public telephones. Apparently he would frequently take a bus into deepest Oxfordshire, get off when he found a phone box, check it worked, and write to BT if it didn't!
After Rex died, I wanted to take on the administration of the Kenavon Railway Society website, so I advised BT Community Webkit of his passing and asked them to pass the site over to me, which they did, along with two others of which I was unaware. One of these was for his Campaign for the Retention of Payphones (CARP). Initially I preserved these two websites in aspic in Rex's memory, and concentrated on the Kenavon site, however earlier this year BT advised me that they would be withdrawing the community webkit and the sites would need to be relocated.
I had no real desire to continue Rex's campaign about telephone boxes, partly owing to lack of time and partly because it's somewhat of a lost cause, but I wished to retain the site in some way to honour his memory. So I have transferred much of Rex's material to a new site https://standingrichard.wixsite.com/phone-box-register, which I intend to use as a photographic register of phone boxes.
Whilst I'm aware of a few phone boxes in my locality which haven't made it onto the website (which I intend to photograph and add), obviously there are a lot I'm either not aware of or are too far away for me to photograph in current circumstances. So, if you have any phone boxes in your locality (red K6 in particular, but any type will do, including TARDISes!), or come across any on your travels, please email me a photo (or share the photo to my Facebook page where I can download it) with a note of:
* Its location
* Its condition (in use, disused, in an alternative use as a defibrillator station/book exchange/artwork etc)
* A Google link to its location
Many thanks