Listed for the Dylan Thomas Award 2024, writer, poet and artist JOSHUA JONES describes the importance of a phone box that became a library in Roath, Cardiff
On the streetside entrance to Roath Pleasure Gardens, and at one end of what’s colloquially referred to as ‘The Rec’, is a telephone box. It’s one of those bright red public kiosks, built to withstand all weather, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in the 1920s. Synonymous with a Britain of a bygone era, they are mostly consigned to streetside relics. This specific one is an unassuming telephone box, but for many years, it also contained a public library. Someone had placed a thin, long bookcase inside the metal frame, and a red plastic tub on the floor, while the actual telephone doubled up as a shelf, and there was another small shelf which would have served to hold a phone book or a Yellow Pages. People from the community took care of it; it was never dirtier than you’d expect, and books would be picked up off the floor and arranged tidily on the shelves. The telephone box contained treasures, and me and June would leave with arms or bags laden with our bounty. It became a weekly ritual to walk up Wellfield Road and across the dirt track alongside the Rec to rummage through the piles of books and magazines. Sometimes I left empty-handed and disappointed. The unknowing was part of the draw.
June and I moved to Albany Road, in the middle of a summer heatwave, into a flat above a zero-waste & refill shop and opposite a music venue, under which are a string of restaurants that seem to change every few months. At the time, one was a ‘genuine’ Italian family-ran pizzeria that served delicious vegan options and, to June’s delight, didn’t skim on the olives. There was a wine bar that disappeared after a few months, a Vietnamese restaurant, kebab shops. Albany Road is stacked with charity shops, good for books, and with easy transport links. It’s also home to Rainbow Bargains, a discount store in a church, where we bought cleaning products and things like plastic bins, batteries and sponges, a washing up bowl.
The flat had two massive rooms which became our bedroom and living room/dining room/office/art studio, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom divided by a communal corridor that ended with the front door to the flat above, where a lovely, older gay man lived, who we could often hear singing and playing piano. He would regularly pop in for a cup of tea and gifted us spider plants.
The telephone box’s public library became my regular source of material; National Geographics, raggedy copies of Vogue, Dazed and I-D from previous eras, newspapers and religious paraphernalia. I tore off the front covers of books that otherwise were covered in streaks of highlighter pen, foxing and mould. I once ‘rescued’ two illustrated encyclopaedias for children from a puddle at the foot of the box. They were drenched through and through, and stank of dirty water, a smell that filled the flat, but made for some interesting ‘found collage’, when the pages dried and I peeled them apart, causing them to rip and tear. Words disintegrated and images bled, creating a whole new conversation on the page.
The telephone box was community organisation in action. Libraries are an inherently social space, and while there was a lot of junk to be found in the telephone box, one person’s junk is another’s treasure. There were children’s books, DIY manuals, holiday reads and Bibles. There were flyers for local Welsh clubs and craft circles, as well as advertisements for local contractors, handymen and hedge cutters. It contained worlds, and infinite possibilities. There is a direct link between my first experiences of a public library, as a young boy growing up in Llanelli, my mother, unable to afford to buy him books, to the telephone box. It’s what motivated me to build my own library at Dyddiau Du with literature on abolitionism, Welsh art and social histories, shelves dedicated to feminist writing, literature in translation, and local writers, artists, zinemakers.
In the phone box, I found books that have stayed with me, and the experiences of finding them. For example, I found a fresh copy of The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus, that looked like it hadn’t been read, down the back of the long thin shelf. I discovered a hardback copy of the letters written between Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva in the summer of 1926, underneath a pile of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson cookbooks. I found Dostoyevsky, Plath, Sartre and Carver amongst the crime thrillers and catalogues for hardware stores.
When June and I decided to break-up, and I moved into a room on the other side of the city, my trips to the telephone box became much less frequent. On my last trip, I discovered it empty, completely devoid of the ramshackle heaps of books and literature. Even the shelving unit was gone, and the red plastic tub. When I went to pull open the heavy door, it wouldn’t budge. Upon inspection, two screws had been drilled through the handle into the frame of the telephone box, so that the door could not be opened. What was once a zone of potential was now a void. And who’s to blame?
The closure of the telephone box’s library is a microcosm of the challenges faced by centres of art, creativity and literature in Cardiff, with landlords and property developments at the core of the issue. The iconic Vulcan Pub, one of the oldest pubs in Cardiff, was demolished and reconstructed at the National History Museum in St Fagans – and recently Cardiff Council announced an overhaul to their public transport schedules, including cutting the 32 from City Centre to St Fagans, with no direct replacement planned. The site of the old Vulcan Park is now a carpark.
Cardiff Museum was facing eviction from its home in The Old Library building on the Hayes and being turned into a ‘mobile attraction’ to save money. This would have been a considerable loss of Cardiff history, culture, and education, if it weren’t for the protestors who fought the plans and caused the council to U-turn on the decision. The demolition plans for Harlech Court means that Porter’s, one of Cardiff’s most popular bars and music venues (and best smoking area in the whole city) is forced to relocate, which is a better fate than other music venues of days past, such as Gwdihŵ and Dempsey’s.
There are empty retail units all over the city. Cardiff council will develop schemes to ‘allow’ artists the windows of these spaces to share work in, then pat themselves on the back. But why not give these empty spaces to the artists? For studio and exhibition space, for research and development of work. For artists to be artists. Community action will always be anti-capitalist. That’s the whole point, and that’s why community services such as libraries and centres for art and culture are continually underfunded. The Council are only interested in window-shopping – art in the windows, but behind the art are empty, dark spaces.
In the telephone box, I became a collage artist. In the telephone box, I read Rilke and Antrobus. It was there for me throughout the seasons, and through depressive episodes. Just a 100x100cm metal box. Smaller than the police box that is Dr. Who’s Tardis — so much is contained within such a small space. A story doesn’t take up much room, and a telephone box can hold entire worlds.
