Charity buys famous phone box for £1

A phone box, which appears on a path made famous by Jane Austen, has been bought by a charity for just £1.

The K6 red phone box is at the end of Gravel Walk in Bath, a walkway which is specifically referenced in the novel Persuasion.

The Bath Preservation Trust purchased the 1935 phone box from British Telecom (BT) for the nominal fee, as part of an initiative to offload the street furniture to charities who then look after them.

The trust said it will now spend thousands of pounds to restore it, and install signage to explain the history of the phone box in the area.

Chief executive of the preservation trust Alex Sherman said: "We want to put some information about the importance of Gravel Walk, its history, maybe talk about its literary relationship...so that people can understand why it's there and its purpose and the original reason for its use."

"It's about 108 years younger than our next youngest building, designed in 1935 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

"His particular design of phone boxes was so unusual and iconic, that it was agreed that most of them should be listed."

BT has sold its old stock of phone boxes to charities or planning authorities, as most of them are no longer in use.

"There's no benefit, there's no financial benefit for us, but it's a really nice piece of our collective heritage that we want to look after," Sherman explained.

"I think everyone loves a phone box because it's so iconic, because it's so well known and we see them, or used to see them on every street corner for many, many decades - so it's going to be education, it's going to tell the story of Bath."

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