See How Solarbox Turns Iconic London Phone Booths into Mobile Charging Stations

With the rise of the mobile phone, phone booths -- which hold an iconic place in social urban history as a place for everything from romantic phone calls to super-hero transformations -- are a rare sight on city streets these days. But a young entrepreneurial duo in London is finding a way to revive that city’s classic red phone booths and give them a contemporary twist, turning them into solar-power charging stations for mobile devices.

Solarbox is the brainchild of company co-founders Harold Craston and Kirsty Kenney, who created the concept while studying geography at the London School of Economics in 2013.

“Our iconic telephone boxes remain symbols of our cultural heritage, but functionally they are in decline,” they said in a press statement announcing the project. “Solarbox plans to reverse this trend by installing solar-powered charge points in kiosks throughout central London.”

Solarbox offers free mobile device charging powered by solar energy in the form of a 150W solar panel on the top of the box. The phone boxes were acquired from British Telecom and painted bright green instead of their traditional red.

“For London’s urban community power will become a public good,” Craston and Kenney said. “This is our response to the need for greater public solutions to public problems.”

Solarbox currently has one box in use on London’s busy Tottenham Court Road. Inside the box are charging connectors to major smartphones most people currently use, including the iPhone, of course. A screen inside the box also shows targeted commercial and community advertising someone can watch while charging their phone.

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About 80 people on average are using the box per day, Craston told Design News in an interview. To keep up with this demand, the prototype box, which is 100% off grid, feeds solar energy into a lithium battery that stores the energy and supplies it to phone chargers directly, he told us.

The next 10 Solarboxes -- planned for deployment soon in central London outside major underground stations -- will do things a bit differently, Craston said. “The next 10 will have a grid connection to assist during high-volume periods and also to ensure that screens -- featuring commercial and community advertising -- can stay on all year round,” he told us.

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This video shows how Solarbox works and how people can use the free service. Craston and Kenney are currently using Twitter (@haroldcraston and @kirstyken) to promote their business and stay in touch with Solarbox users to gain feedback.

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer who has written about technology and culture for more than 15 years. She has lived and worked as a professional journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and NYC. In her free time she enjoys surfing, traveling, music, yoga, and cooking. She currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal.