An Office Inside A Phone Box - And It’s Still Got Everything You Need
It may only measure 8ft high by 3ft wide, but a new tiny office made out of a traditional red phone box has got everything you’d expect from your workspace.
A pioneering project could see the phone box in Cambridge turned into a fully-functioning office, complete with water cooler, coffee maker, printer, scanner and phone if it gets the green light from the city’s planners.
It will look the same from the outside, but inside will also have space for a stool, desk, shelf and multiple power sockets and even a panic button.
The project is the brainchild of the Red Kiosk Company, also known as Thinking Outside the Box, a charitable trust, which has lodged a planning application to transform the kiosk in Bridge Street, Cambridge into a fully functioning office.
Mod cons - the office will have everything, from a water cooler to a phone (Pictures: SWNS)
Miles Broe, architect and spokesman for the company, said: “We have already turned old BT phone boxes into places to sell coffee and ice cream and for a defibrillator and we are transforming more than 100 around the country.
"We have faced opposition from some councils who have said that because the box would no longer be used for communication that they would just demolish it which is an odd attitude to our heritage.”
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The pod will be secured with a password keypad and is covered by CCTV, and also has an escape handle, emergency door release and a smoke detector.
The proposal is part of BT’s Adopt a Kiosk scheme which has seen more than 3,500 phone boxes across the country converted because they had little or no usage.
More than 60,000 K6s were installed between 1936 and 1968 but today only 10,700 survive. They can be leased for about £10 a day or more than £3,000 a year.
History - there are only 10,700 surviving K6s
If the project gets the go-ahead, people would be able to use the office by downloading a form from the company’s website.
But Ian Dyer, Lead Highways Development Management engineer for Cambridgeshire County Council, said as the box would no longer be providing “communication facilities within the public highway”, it was unclear whether it could stay or would have to be removed.
“The Highway Authority therefore objects to the proposal to site an unnecessary and illegal structure within the public highway and recommends that the proposal be refused planning permission,” he said.
