At around 7am yesterday morning, a reversing delivery truck from a convenience store struck a glancing blow to the BT telephone booth on the corner of Upper Galdeford, Lower Galdeford and Tower Street. It’s beside the Ludlow Mural at the former Budgens and directly opposite the Queens.
By late morning, the leaning phone box had become an object of wonder. A work of art perhaps. People stood, stared and talked about the new attraction in Ludlow. The “leaning tower of Ludlow” at least one wag called it.
There is a part of me that wanted to leave the phone booth as it is. Leaning and artistic. An attraction in its own right. A micro version of the famous tumbling telephone boxes of Kingston-upon-Thames.
That’s fantasy. It needed to be made safe. Shropshire Council’s highways team and myself contacted BT about the same time yesterday morning to ask for the booth to be made safe. Within a few hours, BT had dispatched an engineer and called in the power people to make it safe.
The phone booth lay prostrate behind barriers. A short lived work of performance art.
This morning, in a remarkably quick action, BT put the phone booth back upright.
It will be for BT to seek compensation from the store chain that employed the driver that caused this. The incident occurred in full view of the CCTV camera outside One Stop.
