BT have announced plans to remove more than one thousand of its phone boxes this year, after just 3% of calls were made from them in the last month.

33,000 payphones have already been removed over the last decade, which is well over a third of the total.

The plans have caused many people, particularly in rural areas, to fight back against the plans, as they say it’s part of British history.

Everyone is familiar with the traditional red phone boxes, which are now considered a design classic. But as technology has moved on and more and more people now using mobile phones, the demand for a public telephone has declined considerably.

On average, just one call a day is made from the existing phone boxes, with them being used even less in more rural areas.

Mark Johnson from BT said: “Payphones in towns and cities are really well-used, with about 65,000 calls going through them.

“But in rural areas we’ve got 12,000 payphones that haven’t made one call a month in the last 12 months.”

BT are now encouraging communities to buy the lesser used phone boxes under its ‘Adopt-a-Kiosk’ scheme. With this, communities will pay just £1 to buy the box and then they will be able to use it as an information point, a library or for storing medical devices for emergency crews to use on call outs.

For those phone boxes that will remain in place, BT has plans to bring them in to the 21^st Century. Some boxes already have wi-fi capabilities and some have cash machines, the numbers of these will be expanded. They also plan to turn some of the boxes into parcel delivery and collection points.