"Jack Taylor" wrote in message
...

"Clive Page" wrote in message
...

One notes with surprise that an extraordinary number of shop-fronts and
commercial vehicles appear to have been re-painted in the brief period
during which the area codes were 0207 and 0208, and not to have been
re-painted afterwards. What a pity that nobody told them to wait for
the second number change of the pair. :-)

I would hardly say 'with surprise', Clive. The whole exercise was so
spectacularly mismanaged and the misinformation or disinformation that was
received by the general public at large made such a shambles a foregone
conclusion. If I had been the owner of a property or vehicle that had been
erroneously numbered as a result of this mismanagement then I would have
been making a considerable amount of noise about who would be compensating
me for correcting the situation!

I'm usually fairly clued-up about technical changes like this, but I hadn't
appreciated that there was an interim time when 0208 xxx yyyy and xxx yyyy
were valid: I thought they went straight from 0171 xxx yyyy to 020 7xxx
yyyy. What a shame the Oftel made such a dog's breakfast of the changes in
London and didn't have the foresight to go straight from 01 xxx yyyy to 020
7xxx yyyy in one go :-(

I've seen quite a few vehicles which even to this day bear phone numbers
such as 01532 xxxxxx or 01734 xxxxxx, having blindly applied the "insert a
1" rule to codes that changed completely - eg to 0113 or 0118.