What’s behind all the new pay-phones popping up on virgin sites in North Southwark – 12 at the last count – and who knows in what other places? The UK has traditionally been starved of public telephones compared with more phoner-friendly countries like the US, but privatisation and competition from Mercury Communications Ltd is working miracles, and British Telecommunications Plc says that its policy of increasing the number of public payphones is bearing fruit: the company’s latest figures show a total of 85,500 across the UK, 5,000 more than the same time last year; it claims that the increase is part of a threepronged programme first announced in 1985 to modernise existing phones, to improve the quality of service, (which came under furious attack in 1987), and to make phones more generally and easily accessible how about that!
