Originally published on Photoblog by Gethin Thomas MARCH. 17, 2021
It's been a huge task involving many many people but today our box came home. At times we thought it was more of a fantasy than a dream and after three months of raising funds on GoFundMe here is the literally cast iron proof that we have made it. We are calling it The Pandemic Memorial Project.
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Last May it looked like this when I went on a dreary lockdown walk to find something to photograph. Inside was a notice to say that it was soon to be removed forever.
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After posting these photos on our local Facebook page a very slow burn campaign started to save it. How do you organise something like that in a pandemic lockdown? The answer was Facebook and GoFundMe. By the end of the campaign, what started as a minority interest fantasy had become something the majority had decided that they wanted to get behind.
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The GoFundMe started in December and it took us three months. I posted requests for donations several times a week with photos of red phone boxes I have taken over the years. By the New Year it was not looking promising and then at the final moment the campaign suddenly took on a life of it's own.
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We were expecting it to arrive tomorrow but had a last minute panic today when the truck driver phoned to say he was coming a day early.
I was lying in wait for forty minutes in the hope of taking a photo of the truck arriving down our main street. Our main street is very narrow, especially the top end, so when I saw this sight I suspected something big was about to happen.
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