K6 Project maps Britain's red telephone boxes

The K6 Project aims to record and map red telephone boxes in the United Kingdom, these being a much-loved vestige of an earlier era in telecommunications. Unlike in other countries, some effort has gone into preserving the distinctive (mostly cast-iron) kiosks (and the similarly-painted postboxes), infrastructure for which the street has often found other uses. But a new life isn't readily available in every case, writes Paul Bottomley.

As kiosks are decommissioned from public phone usage the risk of removal of the kiosk is very likely unless they are adopted and repurposed.

I want to find out what those new purposes are, who adopted the kiosk and what stories lay behind its usage (both previously and today)

I have been visiting kiosks and have found many varying usages from defibrillator site, recycling centres, local book exchanges or local village guides. 

Bottomley posts photos of all those he encounters, along with an embedded map and technical data about the kiosk.

K6 refers to the most famous and common design, produced by the Post Office until 1968. There were eight revisions; the K7 might now be a classic in its own right but was too revolutionary when proposed in the 1950s and did not enter production. The K8 was neither one thing nor the other and, it turns out, not so durable: only a few dozen remain despite 11,000 having been made. After British Telecom was privatized in the 1980s, it went with a bland modern design that was soon revised to echo the classic, and were later adapted as wifi/cellular hotspots, though a more advertising-friendly monolith appears to be replacing them now.