The phone box may be suffering terminal decline (according to a BBC article, only 3% of adults in the UK said they’d used a phone box in the last month) but there’s been some creative responses which suggests that decline might not equal disappearance.

Clearly, the red kiosk (technically, the T6) is a cultural icon, a classic reminder to anyone over 30 of calls made in anger, love, fear, secret and … the snow, searching for yet another 10p to keep the conversation going. It’s a romantic vision, though I doubt the ‘digital natives’ who would be seen dead making a call from a phone box.

In 2008, the decommissioning of those boxes which were rarely used began. At the same time BT launched a campaign: Adopt a Kiosk. A kind of Big Society idea before the idea of The Big Society was introduced by the current government. What happened was that a number of creative uses emerged from the project. I love them.

This one, in Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset, was bought by the community for a nominal £1.00 and immediately turned into a library – a replacement for the mobile library that the village lost in, well, other processes of ‘decommissioning’. But it’s a lovely idea. The first of what could be a whole host of micro-libraries  in all kinds of wierd and wonderful places.

Another great adoption is the kiosk as defribrillator point in rural areas where ambulance response times are variable (again, because of well, cuts). Here The Community Heartbeat Trust installed the defribillators and trains local residents to use them.

There must be loads of services of this type that could be adapted for use by the decommissioned phone box.

How about a kiosk for shared power tools? The average use of a domestic electric drill is … 15 minutes in its entire lifetime! If there was an outlet to share them close to home, well who would buy them for individual use?

Or the kiosk as salad store? A kiosk could be converted into a mini-greenhouse offering fresh salad for the local community throughout the (extended) growing season. Five kiosks together could become better than a polytunnel and produce all kinds of vegetables through the summer. Egg kiosks. With the expanding hobby of keeping chickens, those extra eggs could be distributed from the local phone box. Craft kiosks, micro-shops of all types …

But the one that I really like (and which I promise to visit) is the Gallery on the Green in Settle, North Yorkshire. Claiming to be the smallest art gallery in the world, the kiosk was opened by Brian May in 2009. With it’s own website and curator, commissions for the gallery are booked up until summer 2012.

I’m now scouring the local area for a kiosk to adopt.