Workers cut a derelict BT phone box out of the pavement outside TK Maxx on Putney High Street this week, ending its year-long blockade of a bus layby.
The box had not made a call in years. Its glass panels were papered over in adverts, its handset dead, its interior rusted and covered in graffiti. BT’s own staff had marked it for removal, with a notice left inside the box, dated 13 November 2024, the better part of two years before anyone actually came for it.
The council wrote to BT. An MP’s video got 750,000 views and a public promise. None of it moved the box. Only BT’s own schedule, in the end, did.
The question is: why? And to know that, you only have to wander up the High Street a few streets.
A billboard with a phone attached
A broken box making no calls is worth nothing to a phone company but the pavement underneath it is worth a great deal. A national study of Britain’s derelict phone boxes, published this year by the think tank Create Streets and the Central District Alliance business improvement district, found that providers keep hold of them chiefly for the advertising revenue, not the phone service, and that many sit in high-footfall spots where a standalone billboard would never get planning permission on its own merits.
Phone companies have been reported asking for a removal fee of between £30,000 and £50,000, based on the lost advertising and data income.
Camden Council hit a similar issue to Putney when it tried to get its own unused boxes taken away: providers were supposed to remove kiosks once they stopped being used for calls, but kept applying to replace them with new ones carrying digital advertising screens instead, with just a phone symbol left on.
Westminster City Council went further. In 2019, it took a developer to court over a kiosk it wanted to build on Marylebone Road, a phone box with a large illuminated ad panel attached. It won in the High Court, and then won again when the developer appealed. Phone kiosks normally get a fast-track approval, not full planning permission, because the law treats them as simple phone equipment. The court found that once a kiosk carries an ad screen as well as a phone, it stops counting as simple phone equipment at all, so it loses that fast-track route and needs a full, refusable planning application like anything else on the street.
So we have ended up in the situation where companies like BT have their property on extremely valuable pieces of real estate, want to replace them with digital ad billboards, but now have to apply for planning permission. The result is a stand-off, with unused phone boxes kept in place as a negotiation tactic for what they really want: a digital advertising screen. And in Putney’s case, the council really wanted that useless box out the way.
Say hello to your new ‘phone box’
Two months before the TK Maxx box came out, Wandsworth approved a different application on the same postcode of Putney High Street: an existing InLink kiosk near Chipotle, at 88-90 Putney High Street, removed and replaced with a new “street hub” carrying two digital advertising screens.
BT bought the InLink network outright in 2020 and rebrands the kiosks Street Hubs. The Chipotle application went through on 6 May 2026, approved outright, none of the refusal or appeal that has met almost every application of its kind elsewhere in the borough this year. Nobody at the council or BT has said whether the two are connected. What sits on the public record is that a licensed advertising panel, owned by the same company, arrived on the same stretch of street within weeks of the derelict box finally leaving it.
It is not an isolated pattern. Wandsworth has been refusing a wave of near-identical applications since February, each one dressed up as a “multifunctional communication hub” combining a defibrillator with an illuminated digital ad screen. Of nine applications from this year’s cycle with a decision on record, eight have been refused, and seven of those refusals are now under appeal.
The Planning Inspectorate has split: it dismissed the appeal at Northcote Road, upholding the council, but overturned an earlier refusal on Wandsworth High Street itself, allowing a near-identical hub there. Wandsworth is not certain to keep winning this fight.
One of this year’s applications sits in Putney itself, on the pavement outside 149 Upper Richmond Road, undetermined, a decision due by 18 August. It would not be the first hub on that stretch of road: an almost identical application two doors down, at 151 Upper Richmond Road, was already approved back in 2024. A second live application sits nearby on Putney Hill, filed in June, also undetermined and also awaiting a decision.
Counting the approved Chipotle swap and the 2024 precedent at 151 Upper Richmond Road, that makes four separate advertising-screen proposals in Putney alone within the past two years. Unlike the pattern elsewhere in the borough, neither of the two Putney applications decided so far has been refused.
Let your councillor know your thoughts
Residents’ formal window to comment on the 149 Upper Richmond Road application has closed, but East Putney’s ward councillors, George Crivelli, Jasmin Glynne and Ravi Govindia, can still be written to before the decision is made. Thamesfield, covering the High Street itself, is represented by Ethan Brooks, council leader Robert Morritt and Salvatore Murtas.
