Phone boxes were meeting places, emergency connections and sometimes the only convenient way to contact home.
Then mobile phones changed everything.
Ofcom says the number of minutes spent making calls from public phone boxes fell from around 800 million minutes in 2002 to only around four million in 2021/22.
That represents an extraordinary collapse in ordinary usage.
For most people today, the smartphone has replaced not only the public telephone but also the camera, map, address book, newspaper, music player and countless other objects that once had to be carried or found separately.
It is therefore unsurprising that many public phones receive very few calls.
But "rarely used" is not always the same thing as "useless."
Why a Phone Nobody Uses May Still Matter
This is where Ofcom's approach becomes significant.
Public call boxes are part of the UK's universal service framework, under which BT and KCOM have obligations relating to public telephony.
Ofcom acknowledges that public phone use has declined substantially because of mobile phones. But it also recognizes that some boxes continue to serve people who do not have access to a working mobile phone or landline, particularly in places with inadequate mobile coverage.
In such circumstances, an old-fashioned public phone can become something much more important than a historical curiosity.
It can become a backup.
Ofcom has highlighted the role of public call boxes in emergency and support calls. In announcing stronger protections, the regulator noted that almost 150,000 calls had been made from public phone boxes to emergency services in the year to May 2020. During the same period, thousands of calls were also made to services including Childline and Samaritans.
Those figures put Arnold's project into a broader context.
The argument for preserving some public telephones is not that society should abandon smartphones or return to an earlier technological era.
It is about redundancy.
Modern life depends heavily on systems that usually work extremely well. But mobile phones can run out of battery. Devices can be lost or damaged. Individual networks can lack coverage. Power failures, extreme weather and other emergencies can disrupt normal communications.
A public telephone may sit unused for weeks or months.
Then, one day, somebody may need it.
How Arnold's Interest Began
Arnold's concern with public telephones did not begin with the 2026 journey.
According to accounts of the project, his interest developed during an earlier visit to Lewis in 2022.
While working on a photographic project, he wanted to telephone his partner to say that he would be returning late. He encountered an old telephone kiosk, but when he picked up the receiver, the line was dead.
The experience stayed with him.
Here was a structure that visually communicated one thing — telephone, connection, communication — while no longer actually performing that function.
For an artist, that contradiction offered fertile territory.
A phone box with no working phone can still be photographed, preserved or admired. It may still contribute to the character of a landscape.
But it has stopped doing the thing for which it was built.
Arnold's "Saving Public Telephony" project grew from that tension between preservation as appearance and preservation as function.
Rather than simply documenting disappearing public phones, he decided to intervene.
That intervention eventually led to Einacleit and those 52 calls.
A Tiny Act Against Disappearance
There is something deliberately disproportionate about the story.