By Bye Phone Boxes –

Scotland to Lose One in Five Public Phone Boxes

Good old BT is to take away a huge swathe of phone boxes in Scotland, it seems we don’t use them anymore and even I was scratching my head to think when was the last time I used a pay phone in the great outdoors and I was stumped. Well over the next three years BT is scrapping more than 900 of the booths. This hasn’t gone down well with many rural communities, what with poor or non-existent broadband and dodgy mobile phone signals with older users not yet hopped onto the smart phone band wagon. But we should be relieved in some ways as BT originally wanted to scrap a third of all pay phones, some 1500 of them. Now it is the situation that a total of 947 kiosks will now be scrapped, leaving 3,840 working phone boxes north of the border. This is way down from about 7,000 in 2003.

Highest Phone Box Saved

Argyll and Bute was to be savaged by phone removal but 46 kiosks were saved along with the highest phone box in the UK at the base of a ski slope in the Cairngorm mountains which is at some 2,00ft. The base cause was a 90% reduction in pay phone usage since the turn of our century.

Wee Book Hoose

But it isn’t all doom and gloom as many communities have adopted the defunct phone boxes and put them to good use. The good folk of Crossmichael have used BT’s "Adopt a Kiosk" scheme to take their phone box for just £1. People thought of ideas, some opined it would be a good bird observatory, others a fish tank, but the winning idea was for a library which would be open  every day, 24 hours a day. It is called “The Wee Book Hoose” and was opened just recently. Originally grey it has been painted a nice bright red. There is no charge and the idea is proving pretty popular. We applaud the initiative of Crossmichael and if there is a phone box due to go in your area, take heart from their civic minded ideas.

Our Efforts for You

Now you too can take heart from this story and from the efforts we at James Pirie take to keep our fine goods affordable for all.  Take this new British made item for example it is a Botanic Garden 8 Inch Salad Bowl made by the good people at Portmeirion and it has a lovely ‘Trailing Bindweed’ and it’s on at a promotional price. It’s a cracker, very pretty.

https://www.jamespirie.com/botanic-garden-8-inch-salad-bowl.html