Is this Britain’s oldest working street telephone box?

This classic K1 design of a telephone kiosk from 1921 stands at the junction of Sherborne Street and the High Street Bembridge. This is often claimed to be the oldest working street phone box in the country, not least by a sign inside it.

Yes, it does still work, and you can ring it up if you don’t want to put 60p in to try it out.

The GPO used the designation K for Kiosk to describe their public telephone booths. In 1921 the first Kiosk K1 was introduced. It was made of concrete panels with a wooden door and in the Mk234 version, wooden window frames. These were changed to metal in the Mk235. In 1927 the design was modified again to make it more like the newly-introduced K2 (the famous red telephone box which went on to become very widely used). This meant deeper window framing and revised roof signage. It became the K1 Mk236, which is the type that now stands in Bembridge.

This one is a Grade II listed building owned by Bembridge Parish Council, and the equipment inside belongs to BT.

Neil Johannessen, the author of Telephone Boxes, published by Shire, explains that this isn’t the oldest working street phone box in the country.

“It is one of the post-1927 ‘face-lifted’ form that picked up on the full-height multi-pane glazing of the Kiosk No.2, which hit the streets of London in the Spring of 1926. And, although still being manufactured until 1934 or so, there are still many of those K2s out on the street working that can be precisely dated to 1926/27. So – and unquestionably – the claim being made for the Bembridge K1 is, sadly, not true.”