28, High Street – Briggs & Co. Hairdressers
At the beginning of the 1900s, the shop was a dairy run by Ernest John Wilcox. Of note in the 1909 Kelly’s trade directory, as well as the main dairy business, the shop also had a “Public Call Office”, one of the first of two public telephones (tel. number Bromley 819) installed in Chislehurst – the other was in a grocer’s shop in Lower Camden near Chislehurst station.
The forerunner of the familiar red telephone box, the “Public Call Office” was a pay telephone housed in a “silence cabinet” inside the shop – see www.britishtelephones.com/histkiosk.html and
www.samhallas.co.uk/repository/documents/public_telephones.pdf
The shop continued as a dairy, run by C. & W. Fisher during WW1 through to the 1930s, and finally by Express Dairies up to the late 1950s.