A shipping container has appeared in the local park:

Container

These containers have become multip-purpose. The first non-shipping use I came across was their conversion into phone boxes in Africa, equipped by entrepreneurs with several mobile phones:

Phone shop in South Africa

The history of the shipping container is strangely fascinating – Marc Levinson’s book [amazon_link id=”0691136408″ target=”_blank” ]The Box[/amazon_link] is a terrific account of how it came to be standardised and what the consequences were for world trade.

[amazon_image id=”0691136408″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (New in Paper)[/amazon_image]

After its publication, the BBC tracked a container for a year, the reports getting under the abstraction of ‘globalisation’.

I think out local box is storing tools but who knows?