People walk outside a polling station located inside Shree Ghanapathy Temple in London, Britain. (Image: Reuters)
Polling booths in the UK are usually church halls, schools and town or village halls but there are also some unusual ones.
Polling stations or polling booths in constituencies across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland opened at 7am on Friday as the UK goes to vote. In the UK, church halls, schools and town or village halls are designated polling booths.
But in these elections a temple, a caravan, a laundromat and a portakabin are also designated polling stations.
The Shree Ghanapathy Temple in London’s Wimbledon is a designated polling station. A portakabin in Andover, Hampshire has been designated as a polling station. A Portakabin is a type of portable building that can be easily transported and used for various temporary purposes.
A laundromat in Oxford was transformed into a polling station and a caravan in Carlton, Cambridgeshire was also a polling station in these elections.
Octogenarian June Thomas of Winwick, Northamptonshire, will never forget to vote because her house, in the Daventry constituency, has been Winwick’s polling station for more than half a century, according to a report by the BBC.
Voters mark their ballots in a hallway beneath a floating staircase.
“I don’t think I’ve ever voted in my house – even though it’s the polling station. I’ve already voted in this election. I can see why people might laugh,” Thomas, who casts her vote via postal vote, was quoted as saying by the BBC.
She told the broadcaster that she used to work as a polling station clerk for the local council. She was granted a postal vote because it was difficult for her to return home to vote on election days.
A polling station has also been set up at the Wimbledon College of the University of the Arts London.
Other quirky polling stations are a mobile library in a Tesco car par park in Cambridge, the Hadleigh Old Fire Station (it now acts as studios for artists), the Long Shop Museum in Leiston, Suffolk, the Fields Farmshop and Cafe in East Bergholt and a farm in Besthorpe, Norfolk.
