Retirement home for rogue phone-boxes.

In the quiet county lanes of Kent, not far from the ancient city of Canterbury, there is a little known high-security prison retirement home for old telephone boxes, which some believe could be the first step on a new road for these once iconic objects.

Most people remember phone boxes, indeed sometimes they're still seen at street corners, but since the era of mobile phones arrived, a decade ago or more, very few phone boxes have actually been used for their original purpose. Unemployment is not an easy role for street furniture to assume. The boxes were vandalised, their phones ripped out, some suffered more degrading treatment as urinals for late-night drunks. With disuse came disengagement, despondency and even despair. Little wonder that some phone-boxes eventually turned to crime. The crime escalated; it began with petty theft, then arson, but as the mood of the phone-boxes hardened they started to form into groups and the groups became gangs. These gangs of phone boxes started to roam the streets at night beating-up late-night drunks, terrorising revellers, hanging about outside kebab-houses and Chinese take-aways. Then there was to notorious Camden Clampdown, about which too much has already been written.

An elite squad of Kentish apple-shepherds was drafted in to the worse trouble spots. Using unsophisticated methods of restraint, previously used only in Russian zoos and English public-school toilets, the boxes were stunned, bludgeoned and rounded up. Most were apprehended.

Now these once noble kiosks are confined in a few strategic high-security premises deep in the heart of Kent. It is hoped the kiosks can be retrained as tourist-fodder and re-deployed in popular resorts, but the success of this programme is still not proven and the idea is very controversial ...