A graveyard of British red telephone boxes in the middle of a forest

One of the most famous cultural icons of the United Kingdom is the red telephone box, a typical feature of British cities.

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The first Post Office booths (which operated the British telephone network from 1912), known as K1s, were white and red. The famous red booth was introduced in 1926 with the K2 model, initially deployed in London. From the introduction of this model and its successors (K3 to K8), over 300,000 red telephone booths were manufactured between the 1930s and 1985, when British Telecom decided to replace this classic design with glass-fronted KX booths.

The vast majority of these phone boxes were made of cast iron on a rectangular concrete base. The door was made of teak. At the top, a white sign with the word "Telephone" indicated its purpose, and above it was placed a Tudor wreath representing the British government, which was responsible for the Postal Service. According to British Telecom in 2023, despite the rise of mobile phones, there are still around 20,000 telephone boxes in the UK, of which about 3,000 are the classic red boxes.

Besides Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there are also still some red telephone boxes in territories that are or have been under British rule, such as Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Malta, the United States, Antigua and Barbuda, Hong Kong, Canada, New Zealand and Israel, as well as in other places such as Normandy (France), Belgium and Germany.

A few days ago, the YouTube channel VacantHaven published a video showing a curious cemetery with hundreds of red telephone booths in the middle of a forest. The video doesn't specify the location, but judging by the number of phone boxes and some abandoned vehicles, it's likely in the United Kingdom.

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Main image: VacantHaven.