ABOUT

Concept

When BT announced that they were decommissioning the only working red K6 phone box in the small rural village of Sharrington in Norfolk, I worked with the community to create a media campaign - with an unlikely hero at its heart - to save it. Dubbed “Derek vs. Goliath” by the media, and fronted by 89-year old Sharrington resident Derek as spokesperson, the campaign captured the country’s imagination. For two months, I delivered strategic press activity to ramp up Sharrington’s reputation – and put pressure on BT to back down and reverse their decision. While press coverage was widespread, BT refused to back down. Afterall, they were well within their rights to decommission the ‘underused’ phone box as only 9 calls had been made from it in a year and it hadn’t reached the 52 calls needed per year to keep it in situ.

With the clock ticking and the odds stacked against it, the K6 was doomed for the junkpile.

With just 72 hours to go until the receiver’s dial tone was cut for good, I invited all 100 villagers to meet at the phonebox to make a call to a loved-one. If BT needed 52 calls to keep the K6, then that’s exactly what we’d give them.


Background

In January 2025, 89-year-old Derek Harris was hosting a monthly community meeting for the Parish of Sharrington, a small, rural village of just 100 people in North Norfolk when something on the agenda caught his eye: BT had notified the village that their beloved red K6 phone box was going to be decommissioned. Derek, who has lived in the village for 50 years, and was born in the same year that the iconic K6 phone boxes were designed, had just received news of his own cancer diagnosis. With his own mortality on his mind, he thought to himself: ‘I don’t want the K6 to die - I’d better do something about this.”

Besides the villager’s love of their phone box, that lights the way into the dark village at night, it has also been used to make numerous calls for help to emergency services as the village receives little to no cell services in parts. One of those calls was in fact made by an ambulance driver who stopped to use the phone box when he couldn’t get a signal on his own phone.

The first port of call for the campaign to save Sharrington’s phone box, was awareness, and I launched a press campaign that targeted local press to start a buzz, but also seeded a single article in the Guardian and included an appearance on ITV. Derek took little press coaching and I encouraged him to talk freely, in his own words, with his own charm. Talking about his own cancer diagnosis, Derek struck a chord with audiences - as a functional phone box, said Harris, “it would be alive, wouldn’t it? That’s why I feel empathy – I feel an empathy for a living thing.”

But rules are rules, said BT – and despite our initial press campaign, they buckled down - saying that the phone box had only been used 9 times in the last year and maintaining it just didn’t make sense. The minimum amount of phone calls needed to keep a K6 phone box is 52 a year – an easy target for a town or city – but for Sharrington’s population of 100, over half would have had to use it in 2024 for it to stay standing.

With only days to go until the phone box received its final death knell, I gave the campaign a new breath of life.

I knew that we needed to reach that magic number of 52 in the next 72 hours, and in fact, we needed to exceed it to really drive home the fact that this phone box is dearly loved and much needed.

What I really needed to do, was get every single person in the village of Sharrington to came out to use the phone box and in fact, make so many phone calls from it that BT would not only agree to keep it, but give it a revamp to reflect its new status as one of the most visited phone boxes in the county. (While it’s weather-battered redcurrant paint gave it a charm, much like Derek’s, a new coat of paint, a new receiver to replace the broken one and the gentle relocation of rather large resident spiders in the phone box was much needed).

I needed villagers – and lots of them - to come together and meet at the phone box, phone numbers of their loved ones in hand. I needed to alert the press, and convince them to come to a rural spot in the deepest, darkest part of Norfolk on an ice cold day in the hopes that villagers would come out in full force. I needed 100 letters of invitation to the event delivered to doors and I needed coffee, so much coffee. And I needed it all to happen with just three days to go.

Execution
With time of the essence, I approached the local MP, councillors and those with the loudest voices in the village to gather the troops. I wrote a letter to residents from Derek and his local MP inviting them to meet at the phone box and made sure it was delivered to every door with as much speed as volunteers could muster.

On a very chilly Friday morning in March, I met Derek at the phone box at the agreed time. The press pack I had invited were already there, huddled together, complaining about the lack of mobile signal as they sipped coffee from their flasks, and we waited.

The first pair of villagers arrived on crutches, helped on by their neighbours. With many of the villagers elderly and needing care, it was a big ask to request that they make their way to the phone box, but the village banded together to make it happen. Residents in the village took turns looking after those who were unable to leave their beds, ensuring that adult children acting as carers could come out to make a phone call. The most elderly or ill residents were immediately shuffled to the front of the queue to make sure that they could make their phonecalls – every single one mattered.

As the day went on, villagers kept on arriving and the growing queue that consisted of community members chatting away and catching up was a brilliant visual of just how much people wanted to save their phone box. I arranged phone interviews for Derek and the villagers with press who were thrilled to conduct them over the crackling line of the K6 – all adding to the amount of coverage that was quickly ramping up as the day went on.

Finally – it was time for the numbers. Villagers had given their all – but would it be enough?


Result

By the end of the next day, with the village on tenterhooks, the results were in. 146 phone calls had been made from the phone box, and adding to those the 9 previously made, drove numbers up to 155 – almost triple the goal, and 100 more phone calls than were needed to save the beloved K6. This was a fantastic result for the press who had supported the campaign throughout and of course for the villagers.

Speaking to the press, BT said that they had reversed their decision to remove it after the "significant number of calls made by villagers from the payphone highlighted its importance to the community".

But, BT had not heard the last of Derek, who requested that, now the phone box was going to be staying, that it be given a makeover to ready it for spending the next 50 years as a Sharrington icon. BT were fantastic, and agreed to give the phone box a new door, a new receiver and of course – the new coat of redcurrant paint that it so deserved.

The campaign not only highlighted the importance of staying connected in a modern world, it also powerfully relayed the impact that a community can have on the decision-making of a large organisation like BT, if they stand together in unison.