Preston’s Red Phone Boxes Return as LED Screens With Ad Consent

Preston City Council has cleared the first planning hurdle to wire its row of nine Grade II listed red phone boxes with bright LED screens, and the report that approved them grants something the kiosks were never built to carry: advertisement consent. Disconnected by BT more than a decade ago, the boxes will return to the city centre as glowing digital displays rather than working call points, ready to push public messages and curated art at passers-by.

There is an irony in the timing. For most of the past decade, councils across Britain have fought to keep illuminated advertising screens off their heritage streets. Preston is now building one into nine of the most protected pieces of street furniture the country makes.

Nine Boxes, 24 Square Metres of LED and One Cleared Hurdle

Preston City Council’s planning officers signed off the permission in a report that judged the altered kiosks would do only limited harm to the surrounding heritage. The nine red boxes normally stand in a row beside the former main Post Office near the city’s Flag Market, and they have sat in storage since contractors finished restoring them. Before any of it returns to the street, the authority still needs a separate planning permission covering how, and when, the screens are allowed to operate.

The displays come from ADI, a Preston audio visual specialist with 35 years of work installing screens in the public realm, which the council commissioned to fit around 24.2 square metres of fine-pitch LED (light-emitting diode) across the row. Working with Studio John Bridge Architects, the firm will mount the screens inside each kiosk, one behind every pane of specially toughened glass, with discreet speakers adding low ambient sound. The full digital telephone box installation specification is published on the contractor’s site, and the restoration itself was funded by central government regeneration money.

The council frames the return as the recovery of something the city lost. “The telephone boxes are an iconic piece of Preston’s history and have been missed whilst they have been getting their makeover,” said John Chesworth, chair of Preston’s Towns Fund Board, the regeneration body whose budget sits behind the work. Geraint Williams, ADI’s founder and chief executive, called the project a chance to contribute “something meaningful to Preston’s city centre.”

The numbers behind the scheme are modest in scale but specific in their limits:

• 24.2 square metres of 5mm-pitch LED spread across the nine kiosks
• 300 candelas per square metre maximum brightness after dark, half the industry lighting ceiling, rising to 4,800 in daylight
• More than 10 years since BT disconnected these boxes from the network

The Advertisement Consent Tucked Inside the Report

On paper, the council describes the boxes in the language of culture rather than commerce. The screens are meant for “public messaging” and “creative expression”, for wayfinding and what the report calls “heritage interpretation” of the listed buildings nearby. Yet the same document also secures advertisement consent, the formal permission that allows a surface to carry paid advertising, even though a further approval would be needed before any advert actually ran. Brightness is capped at 300 candelas per square metre after dark, a measure of luminance set at half the ceiling in guidance from the Institution of Lighting Engineers (ILE), with the screens switched off overnight.

Planning officers rated the effect on the Market Place Conservation Area as a “minor degree of visual change” that could be carefully managed without altering the area’s character, and the impact on neighbouring heritage assets as minor. What the boxes will actually display, by the council’s and contractor’s own accounts, runs wide. The published Preston City Council account of the kiosk restoration floats a long menu of uses:

• Public information, wayfinding and promotion for local businesses and events
• Heritage interpretation of the listed buildings around Market Street
• Curated digital art, seasonal themes and locally relevant content
• Moving abstract art, statues or, as one description put it, “portals into another world”

The sell leans on spectacle. “The refurbished telephone boxes will create a real digital spectacle that you won’t want to miss,” said Preston city councillor Anna Hindle. Aaron Jabbary of ADI said the bespoke technology could “showcase local culture, collaborate with artists, and highlight events” once the row is back in place.

Why Britain Spent a Decade Fighting Phone Box Screens

That cultural framing matters, because screens on phone boxes carry a bad reputation. For most of the past decade, operators such as New World Payphones have applied to plant fresh kiosks combining a token handset with a large advertising panel, and planners have resisted. Westminster City Council rejected roughly 170 such applications over two years; had they all gone through, parts of the borough would have had a kiosk every 15 metres, and some councils reported application volumes up by several hundred percent in a few short years. In February, the High Court ruled that phone boxes carrying digital advertising screens require full planning permission.

A lot of them are advertising totems with a telephone handset on it. They’re just a blot on the landscape.

Those words came from Westminster City Council’s director of planning, summing up a wave of applications the council saw as street clutter. Preston’s plan differs in ownership even where the hardware rhymes. The screens are art-led, and the council, not a billboard firm, decides what appears on them. The permission to advertise sits with the local authority itself, which is a very different starting point from a private totem, and it means accountability runs to the ballot box rather than to a media owner’s revenue targets.

From Pound-Coin Defibrillators to Council-Run Screens

Britain has been recycling its red kiosks for years. Through BT’s Adopt a Kiosk scheme, a community group can buy a disused box for £1 and convert it into a defibrillator station, a tiny lending library or a local art display, with the listed cast-iron shell kept intact. The terms are not trivial and the heritage rules are strict; Historic England sets out what is allowed in its guidance on adapting listed K6 telephone kiosks before any change is made.

The commercial route looks nothing like the village defibrillator. There, private operators chase advertising income, often by stripping out tired old boxes and dropping in sleek new units whose entire purpose is the screen they carry. That is the model Westminster and other councils have spent years resisting, and the reason new ad-bearing kiosks now draw such close planning scrutiny across English high streets.

Preston occupies a third position. The council owns the kiosks outright, spent public money to restore them, and keeps editorial control over what the screens display while holding the same advertising permission a commercial operator would chase. It is heritage rescue and public art with a revenue lever attached, run from inside the town hall rather than by an outside firm.

The catch is durability. Editorial restraint is easy to promise at launch and harder to keep when regeneration grants run out and a lit screen in a prime city-centre spot starts to look like an obvious source of income. Nothing in the consent forces the council to fill the boxes with art rather than adverts in later years.

What Survives of Gilbert Scott’s 1935 Design

The boxes themselves are a national design icon. The K6 was drawn by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1935 to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George V, and it went on to become the most common red kiosk on Britain’s streets, with more than 3,000 examples still carrying listed protection. That status is why the screens hang inside the boxes rather than bolting to the outside; you can trace the K6 kiosk’s design history through the Design Museum’s record of the red telephone box.

Physically, very little of the original is altered. The cast-iron shell is left untouched, and each screen sits behind a pane of specially toughened glass on the inside of the box, so the familiar silhouette reads from across the street exactly as it always did, only now it glows. Conservation officers accepted the scheme partly because the change is reversible and the kiosks’ character stays intact, restoring a use to objects whose original job vanished once mobile phones arrived in nearly every pocket.

BT cut these particular boxes off from the network more than a decade ago, and they have been out of public view ever since. The council has not set a date for the row to come home, and the screens cannot light up until that second planning permission is granted. For now, nine red icons wait in storage.