ON A RECENT Sunday afternoon, Hampstead High Street offered a very British sight: an orderly queue outside a red telephone kiosk that has not been used to make a call for many years. Danny Baker, a retiree-turned-barista, whips up flat whites on an espresso machine where the phone used to be. The novelty of the kiosk draws in passers-by, some of whom have become regulars.
Edward Ottewell, who owns the kiosk, seems to have found a way to keep it, and others around Britain, useful and profitable. He has bought more than 100 and rents some out for a few thousand pounds a year. One, a few streets from the one Mr Baker rents, houses a cupcake machine. Another is home to a QR code that offers discounts for an ebike-share scheme. Mr Ottewell also sells kiosks on Bidx1, an online platform. The one Mr Baker rents is on the market for £57,500 ($76,200).
Britain once had more than 60,000 red telephone boxes. The original red-box model, the K2, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect responsible for Battersea Power Station and Liverpool Cathedral. Most were K6s, a design Scott updated to mark King George V’s silver jubilee. For BT, Britain’s former telecoms monopoly, which owns them, they are a drain on resources. It has been seeking to offload them ever since mobile phones made them redundant. Its official reseller offers uprooted K6s online—£1,750 for a fixer-upper; £2,900 for one with a lick of paint.
But about 200 K2s and 3,200 K6s have a historic designation, often Grade II, which means they cannot be moved or significantly altered without approval. So since 2008 BT has also been running an “Adopt a Kiosk” programme, under which charities and councils can buy a box for £1 to turn it into something useful, like a home for a defibrillator or book-swap library—and, to BT’s displeasure, mini-cafés and coffee shops run for profit.
Mr Ottewell bought his K2s and K6s at this knockdown price through a charity he co-founded. It appears to have sold them to a company, also co-founded by him, which rents them out and sells them on. One off Ashford High Street in Kent went for £5,400 in March. He has since sold another 40 or so, including some at eye-watering prices. In November a buyer from Hong Kong paid £43,000 for one. Another, outside the British Museum, went for £32,000 to an artist who plans to use it as gallery space. Most have a heritage designation, which means buyers in effect also get the square metre of land the kiosk sits on.
So far, so standard for the “law of rent”, according to which the person who owns a scarce resource reaps the profit when that resource is put to productive use. But now BT is threatening legal action. In May it served a legal letter to Mr Ottewell’s company and charity, saying that they were not “honouring their contractual obligations” and disputing the right of either to sell the kiosks. (Mr Ottewell did not respond to requests for comment.)
Any case may turn on whether BT can prove that Mr Ottewell always intended to use the boxes to make profits rather than for charitable purposes, says Rob Bratby of Bratby Law, a firm that specialises in telecoms. The standard contract says BT can reclaim boxes from a buyer that loses charitable status, but does not prohibit resale. So unless a specific clause was included, buying boxes for charitable purposes and then changing your mind would probably be fine, Mr Bratby thinks.
If BT did manage to prove misrepresentation, it might be able to seek the return of the kiosks Mr Ottewell still owns, but not those he has already sold. That would mean even fewer available for private purchasers and—by another iron law of economics, that of supply and demand—even higher prices. ■
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Bigger inside”
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