WHO YOU GONNA CALL?
‘YOU ONLY NEED ONE SQUARE FOOT TO CHANGE A COMMUNITY’
What can you do with one pound?
For Ray Barron-Woolford, the answer was to buy a phone box.
Sitting under the ‘rainbow bridge’ on Deptford High Street, the phone box was unloved and used as a toilet. Barron-Woolford, who founded the We Care Food Bank in Lewisham, thought he could put it to better use. Within three days of contacting BT, he had signed a contract to buy it for £1. It was transformed, opening at the end of February as a 24/7 community hub.
Every nook and cranny was used. The phone box was given a redecoration and filled with food and drink for those in need, its walls covered with advice and numbers to contact vital services.
It was a different way to help people – and a way to do so that made sure people didn’t need to ask for help to get what they need.
“When we opened it everyone said people would trash it and keep using it as a toilet,” Barron-Woolford says. But one
