Phone Box, New Job (8 Photos)

The phone box found other work

Hardly anyone steps into a red phone box to make a call now. Since 2008, more than 7,200 of them have been adopted by communities across the UK for £1 each, and the boxes went on to hold book swaps, tiny art shows and life-saving kit. A few phone booths outside Britain changed jobs too.

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🖼️ Gallery on the Green — Settle, England 🇬🇧

Look at the sign above the door: it says GALLERY. The town council in Upper Settle bought the box in early 2009 and handed it to a local group to run as an art space. It calls itself “possibly the smallest public art gallery in the world”, and it never closes.

💡 Size Fact: Pieces sent in by the public must be no larger than a postcard.

📷 Photo: “The Gallery on the Green and post box” by Humphrey Bolton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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📚 Westbury Book Exchange — Westbury-sub-Mendip, England 🇬🇧

The glass still sits under the TELEPHONE sign, but the red letters on it now say Westbury Book Exchange. When the mobile library stopped coming to Westbury-sub-Mendip, the parish council bought the box for £1, a volunteer screwed four shelves into place and someone added a “Silence please” notice.

💡 Budget Fact: Villagers donated the first books, and the whole library cost just £30 to set up in 2009.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Converted Telephone Kiosk, Westbury-sub-Mendip (2)” by David Hillas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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❤️ Defibrillator Box — Filkins, England 🇬🇧

One roof sign still says TELEPHONE; the one above the door says DEFIBRILLATOR. In Filkins, a Cotswold village of stone cottages, the bright red box now holds a heart defibrillator anyone can use in an emergency, marked by the green signs inside the glass.

💡 Heart Fact: Since 2009 the Community Heartbeat Trust has worked with BT to install more than 700 defibrillators in adopted phone boxes across the UK.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Defibrillator in a telephone box, Filkins, Oxfordshire – August 2025” by Mertbiol / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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🏛️ Phone Box Museum — Clare, England 🇬🇧

Open the door and the walls are covered in framed old photographs and typed caption cards. This box in Clare, Suffolk works as a tiny museum of the town’s past, small enough that one visitor fills it.

💡 Museum Fact: BT says adopted boxes have become defibrillator units and libraries, mini art galleries and local museums.

📷 Photo: “Tiny museum in a phone box, in Clare” by Matt Brown / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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☕ Coffee Kiosk — London, England 🇬🇧

The door stays open, the shelves inside hold bottles and syrups, and a red-clothed counter stands where the queue used to wait for the phone. This box on Cromwell Gardens in South Kensington now serves coffee.

💡 Coffee Fact: London isn’t alone: in Birmingham, a charity project called Thinking Outside the Box turned an unused red box into a coffee stand for commuters.

📷 Photo: “Liv Coffee ltd” by Roy Katzenberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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📖 Book Swap Booth — Leipzig, Germany 🇩🇪

This grey and magenta Deutsche Telekom booth is now lined with wooden shelves of books. It stands in the courtyard of the Gutshof Stötteritz, out of sight from the street, in Leipzig-Stötteritz. The rule on the door is simple: “Bring eins, nimm eins” — bring one, take one.

💡 Price Fact: Around Golzow in Brandenburg, the local Landfrauen run four lending booths in old phone booths, and Telekom charged 2,000 euros for each one.

📷 Photo: “Leipzig-Stötteritz – Bücherzelle (Oberdorfstraße 15) 01” by Cookroach / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

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🚑 Library and Defibrillator — Fotheringhay, England 🇬🇧

Two jobs in one box: a yellow defibrillator cabinet on top, paperbacks on the shelves below. Look through the glazing bars of the kiosk in Fotheringhay and you can pick up a novel and know where to find help in the same visit.

💡 History Fact: This small village had a castle where Richard III was born in 1452 and Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in 1587.

📷 Photo: “Fotheringhay: The Telephone Box Library” by Michael Garlick / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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☎️ The Wind Phone — Ōtsuchi, Japan 🇯🇵

The phone in this white booth isn’t connected to any line. Garden owner Itaru Sasaki in Ōtsuchi built the booth a few months before the 2011 tsunami, after he lost his cousin to cancer. After the disaster, people came from all over Japan to dial the black rotary phone and talk to family members they had lost.

💡 Book Fact: The booth inspired Laura Imai Messina’s 2020 novel The Phone Box at the Edge of the World.

📷 Photo: “Ōtsuchi wind phone 4” by Matthew Komatsu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)