In message , Tim Roll-Pickering
writes

London never ever had 0207 or 0208 dialling codes. It's some myth put
about by the media every time they have a slow news day and they attempt
to provoke some outrage that Londoners will be confused by these 'new 0203
codes' or somesuch rubbish. London dialling codes went from 01 to 071/081
to 0171/0181 to 020. Nothing more, nothing less.

To be a bit fair the phone code change was not very well advertised in this
form. Rather in 1995 the big message was "it's 1 to remember" aka "phone
codes get an extra 1 added" and in about 2000 the message was more "numbers
beginning 0171 become 0207, 0181 become 0208" than "0171 & 0181 merge back
into a single district of 020 with numbers that used to have the 0171 prefix
now having a 7 added to the start and those with 0181 having an 8 added".

Now I realise the latter is not the easiest message to convey, and splitting
the reorganisation in two would have taken much longer and given everyone
another huge bill to rearrange their hoardings, letterheads etc... but was
any attempt made in the advertising to actually drive home the point that
all of London was becoming a single area? Everything I can recall was a much
simpler "this number becomes that number" or even "the area code changes
again".

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I understood it perfectly
at the time and subsequently. I don't ever remember an official message
saying or implying that numbers went from 0171/0181 to 0207/0208.

The only thing that may potentially have confused things was that during
the changeover, there was a period towards the end of the 0171/0181 era
when you could use the new 020 dialling code, but because the numbers
hadn't been converted, the local portion was still 7 digits and you had
to dial the full number. This happened for a few months but was never
officially communicated. I only knew this at the time as I worked for a
company where my job involved dealing with telephone connections and I
had a lot of dealings with BT in those days.
--
Steve Fitzgerald has now left the building.
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