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.
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.
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.
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.
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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