Mark Mason

The marvellous reinvention of phone boxes

  • From Spectator Life
Image: Getty

Britain’s legendary red phone boxes are in the news again. Of course they’re a symbol of the country’s past (about 2000 of them are officially listed buildings) – but what makes them really great is their capacity for reinvention.

The story this week was about Ofcom preventing BT from closing down many of the nation’s 21,000 phone boxes. A box will now be saved if it meets one of several criteria, such as being located at an accident or suicide hotspot, or if more than 52 calls have been made from it over the past 12 months. But everyone knows what the long-term trend will be in a country where virtually everyone owns a mobile phone.

The red box was born in 1924, when the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott won the Post Office’s competition for a design that would satisfy the London boroughs, who were refusing to install the previous model. Scott’s K2 (the K standing for ‘kiosk’) copied its domed roof from the tomb of Sir John Soane in St Pancras Old Church (still there today), but thankfully the Post Office ignored his suggested colour of silver – they went with red, to match their post boxes. The K2 was made of iron, but the wooden prototype submitted for the competition is now at the entrance to the Royal Academy (in the left hand arch as you enter from Piccadilly).

Various tweaks followed. The K4 included a post box and a machine for buying stamps on the outside, but didn’t last long as the noise of the machine disturbed anyone making a call. The K6 was smaller, to take up less pavement space. (One story has it that earlier models had been the height they were to allow use by a man wearing a top hat.

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