"As the campaign picked up speed, one day a queue of people made more than 230 calls from the K6. Harris sparked a national conversation about the continuing need for kiosks in an age of mobiles. Behind the scenes, he was a tenacious activist, sending constant emails to his MP, councillors, and of course, BT. Some of them included photographs he had taken of BT vans whose engineers were working nearby, as proof the phone box could be easily maintained."
"When he saw, on the agenda for the parish council meeting, that BT had earmarked it for closure, Harris knew he had to fight it. It's fighting for what is valuable, cherished, he told me when I went to meet him in February, sitting over coffee in a cafe near Sharrington, the Norfolk village that has been his home for more than 50 years, and the phone box for longer."
Derek Harris, 89, of Sharrington, Norfolk, led a campaign to save the village's K6 phone box after BT proposed closure for low usage. The K6, designed in 1935 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, had fewer than ten calls in 2024, below the 52-call retention threshold. Volunteers from the village and surrounding areas staged mass-calling events, once making over 230 calls in a day. Harris sent frequent emails and photographed nearby BT vans to show maintainability. The campaign attracted national and global attention, prompting BT to reverse its decision. Harris treats the kiosk with affection and frames the effort as community resistance to large organisations.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]