Pay-phones

Once upon a time, pay-phones/public telephones used to only cost 5p to call someone. Now you hardly get to say much at all for a minimum of 20p. British Telecom must have spent millions on repairing damaged phone-boxes over the years; If they were really clever, they could have given every home free phones like they do in America, and they could have sewn up the market before all the open-competition of the variable phone companies.

These days, most pay-phones where I live either smell of urine so you wouldn't want to hang around long enough to make a call, or they don't work anyway. Now that most people own a mobile phone, they've lost their main purpose in life, but the red ones will always remain iconic in London life - and when you're in a real emergency and your mobile's run out of battery!

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Author of this article:

AndyM

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Do You Remember Pay-phones?

adidas on 2022-09-06 09:21:53

The cheapest call you could make was actually 2p - I remember carrying 2p coins with me in my 'emergency kit' in scouts in case i needed to make that important phone call from a telephone kiosk!

Chaobaby7 on 2016-06-26 20:54:14

they stunk of pee, i used to use one daily to phone my boy friend at 6pm every evening til the evening two young lads were waiting outside the phone box and acting in a menacing way which put me off so I started using the pay phone down the down the local pub instead. I have a fond memory of going in a phone box with my friend in 1982 to listen to "Dial a disc" we had " Rainy night in Georgia" and both managed to listen to it.