I’m not interested in those listed red phone boxes. Or quirky phone boxes that have been painted pink and turned into mini pop-up libraries. For ten years I’ve been documenting the fall of the KX100, relics of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s privatisation of most state-owned services used by the working classes, which included British Rail, British Gas, The Royal Mail and, of course, British Telecom.
Because the KX100s are so unloved, their lighting has barely changed, and the dim, diffuse glow they gently emit appears as though it has bottled up the atmospheric ambience of stadium lighting at an FA Cup final in 1993, or a concrete underpass in 1987, or an old fashioned living room in 1975…moody, retro light. The only thing close to the feeling of being inside a KX100 is the (far more treacherous…) lift of an unloved council estate.
BT stopped manufacturing the KX100 in 2001, when there were nearly 140’000 of these low-fi time machines in Britain. Now there are fewer than 40’000, and their disappearance is exponential. Who cares? Not me, particularly, but located in all their banality are pimp cards, political statements, racist graffiti, poems, traces of homelessness and addiction that provide a protrait of a nation with its knickers down. I tried to capture their mood and the smell.