It has seen better days, this old red phone box. Plonked on the edge of Piccadilly Circus in London, decades of taxi fumes and dirty drizzle have left its windows thick with grime. Its floor is littered with cigarette butts and the back wall is plastered with sex ads. It smells of urine.

And yet, in the space of one hour on a busy weekend morning, it is rarely empty.

Lidia Castro, 51, arrives to call her family in Chile, first carefully peeling off the fliers from the wall and placing them face down on the ledge in front of her. She speaks only a few words of English and does not understand what is written on them, “All body & legs & all yours”, but she understands the pictures of naked ladies.

As she talks, tourists line up to have their photo taken in front of the box. When Ms Castro finishes her call, they move inside, posing for the cameras with the greasy, black receiver to their ears.

“In my country, we don’t have things like this,” says Maria Cristina, 26, from Brazil. “The bus, the birds, the Underground, the telephone - it is London.”

A lone man skulks into the box. His eyes scan the walls for the calling cards that Ms Castro removed earlier. There are none and he hurries off.

More tourists come. A family of five from Spain squeeze in together and grin out from the door. Two Korean girls smile shyly and give the peace sign through the window. A group of Japanese businessmen stand stiffly in front. “England symbol, England symbol,” they say when asked why they would want a photo of a telephone box.

After half an hour, another caller arrives. Fouad Mohamed, 33, from Ethiopia, is a phone-box regular. A shop worker during the week, he spends his weekends calling round London’s homeless hostels, finding out where there are beds available and guiding anybody who needs one to them.

No one has asked him to do it and he does not get paid. He offers no explanation for this act of kindness, except that he also likes to use the phone boxes to roll his cigarettes in peace.

The final caller of the hour is 48-year-old Evan Senko, a handsomely weathered Slovenian calling home to wish a friend happy birthday. “I have no mobile phone,” he shrugs, before adding sadly: “I am not of this world.”

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