Off Topic: Britain's Red Phone Booths Revamped...
Kharma
Posts: 3,214
in The Commons
I just saw the most amazing thing on the news over here in Canada! They were showing how Britain's Red Phone Booths are being refurbished into cafes and shops...one was a coffee shop, one was a salad bar, and the other they showed fixed cellphones. Personally I think this is a uniquely creative way of reusing them instead of removing them completely.
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I don't know about the red boxes but the Police Boxes (Tardis) are being used for those purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_box
Red ones are a bit small for those things. I do like them and they stuck around longer than the pay phones did in Zurich once cell phones became common place.
In NYC back (late 70s - 80s) when they had the full sized booths with the closing doors, most of them could double as a urinal... I think people still pee on the few empty skeletons of the half booths, just to keep the tradition alive.
Edited to add... You know, in the US, we mostly got rid of our full sized booths many years ago... And they were a bit smallish compared to the Brit booths... But we have pretty big Port-A-Potties... Refurbishing them into small cafes, newsstands, mini Barnes&Nobles, small supermarkets or missile silos might just be a great business opportunity for that go-gettum kinda entrepreneur...
Thanks for reminding us it's not such a bad thing to remove that antiquated technology.
Actually, you get used to it... And I suppose it was convenient for some... There was a definite lack of public facilities back then.
Also defibrillator stations, mini libraries, small museums. and even a mini bar.
Those are all very ingenious ideas! Does anyone have any photos?
I drew a picture of the port-a-potty being used as a mobile missile silo... It's not very good and it was in yellow crayon on a napkin... There was hot wing sauce involved too...
Why do they give yellow crayons? They are very hard to draw with...
I think there were some photos, or links, in the Members Only thread on the British Street Furniture set.
Red Telephone boxes reused.
Library
Pub
Coffee Shop
Defibrillator
Okay, so, yeah, those phone boxes are as small as I thought they were. People in the UK are, apparently, tenacious and brilliant!
And, they don't mind things on a smaller scale. 
We live on a small Island, really, and frequently our houses are a lot smaller than those in the US of A, so we get used to living in and using smaller spaces.
And famously, the recent demise of full booths provided a good gag in the first Superman film (whose viewers still remembered that Clark Kent once used phone booths as a dressing room).
Thanks for the photo links, they look awesome! McGyver your photo is awesome too! LoL
...I still remember that scene. Now he'd have to use a Porta-Potty. Oh the indignation super heroes have to go through these days.
On the serious side, not oinly have the traditional American phone booths disappeared, but pay phones in general have become an "endangered species" even in the city thanks to society today expecting everyone to have a cellphone. Before I finally got one of those card chargeable flip phones, I had to walk nearly a mile to find the closest pay phone (and I live in the city). Only few years ago, there were several within a few blocks walk from where I lived.
Here in Portland whild not a telephone box, someone took over one of the old 1970s bus shelters downtown and turned it into a coffee shop
Before:
After:
Oh, and by the way, in my story, those quaint red telephone boxes in London still exist for their primary function.