Just connecting you, caller...
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present... The British red telephone box.
The example in the photograph is in the village of Bolsterstone, to the west of Wharncliffe Crags and to the immediate north of Moore Hall and Broomhead reservoirs. Included in shot is also what's known as a "lamp box" style of Royal Mail post box.
The phone box design is the best-known: the K6.
So, where did they come from? And in an age of portable, personal communications, what will become of them?
The General Post Office—in later centuries often abbreviated to the GPO—was actually founded in 1660 under King Charles II. It provided only for the delivery of mail from town to town, not a comprehensive postal delivery service to the front door.
Services became more reliable and standardised after the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post in 1840. Pillar boxes for mail were introduced in 1852 (originally in the Channel Islands, at the suggestion of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. The earliest remaining box in the British Isles is on Union Street, St Peter Port, in Guernsey. Originally green it became oxblood/red but it has not been updated to the present Guernsey blue).
The business of communications was felt to be of such national importance that The Telegraph Act of 1868 later allowed the Postmaster General to take control of telegraphy from the private companies that had already begun their services, and absorb it into the purview of the GPO as the official monopoly provider.
Similarly, existing early telephone services were later added to the government-run monopoly of the GPO in 1912, though there were suppliers (usually municipalities) who escaped. Notable cases of the latter included the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, and the town of Kingston-Upon Hull (which explains why the colour schemes of their phone boxes came to differ from the otherwise ubiquitous red of the rest of the UK).
With various random designs applied hitherto, The Royal Fine Art Commission initiated a design competition for standardising UK telephone kiosks in 1923. The winning design, designated K2 when in production, was devised by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Originally only installed in the capital, they were painted red for high visibility, though today a more vibrant shade of the colour is used.
Gilbert Scott was the third generation of a family of well-known architects: his grandfather had designed the Gothic splendour of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station in London and the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens; his father, a number of Cambridge University colleges. Sir G, himself, designed (as well as the phone boxes) the wonderful Anglican cathedral in Liverpool and the 'Temples of Power', Battersea power station and Bankside power station (the latter now repurposed as the home of the Tate Modern art gallery).
The aforementioned Midland Grand Hotel, after laying semi-derelict for decades, has re-opened in more recent years as The St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Prior to that, its handsome Gothic interior graced many a motion picture and a stairwell appeared as part of Arkham Asylum in Batman Begins. Though in reality serving as the façade to St Pancras mainline station, its exterior—perplexingly to English audiences—serves as the exterior to King's Cross Station in the Harry Potter fantasy pictures. While King's Cross, itself, is a very handsome building (now that the 1970s lean-to retail units have been removed), I suppose that the Gothic St Pancras was felt to be more visually in keeping with all the fantastical wizardry, though the platform scenes are shot at King's Cross.
Here's St Pancras as I photographed it recently:
Back on topic! After succeeding models there came the even more familiar K6 kiosk. Similar to, but shorter, lighter and less expensive than the K2, (and with a different glazing pattern) this model eventually became widespread throughout the country.
In 1969 the GPO was legally changed from being a Department of State to a Statutory Corporation and its assets transferred to the new body: The Post Office. Telecommunications and the Royal Mail became more definitely separated functions.
British Telecommunications (otherwise British Telecom, or BT) was hived off from the Post Office and privatised in 1980, whereupon the company changed its visual identity and began repainting its telephone boxes yellow to match. Public outcry put a stop to that misconceived idea, but some BT K6 yellow boxes can probably still be found. BT has changed its corporate ID at least thrice more since their acidic yellow/cyan scheme, but relic traditional boxes have predominantly remained red or been repainted in that colour.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, glazing was simplified in some examples and a 'modern' boxily rectangular red K7 introduced. Post-privatisation, cheaper, lighter (ie flimsier) and more easily maintained modern designs were erected where new boxes were required, or where old K6 boxes were retired. This eventually led to their wholesale removal (from 1985), especially provincially. Another public outcry failed to save them (except where local authorities invoked preservation legislation) though, in fairness, maintenance of K6 boxes was costly and their design made them difficult to use, especially for the handicapped. The red boxes removed were sold and became expensive but desirable objects, repurposed into shower cubicles, impractical greenhouses (glasshouses) and the like in prosperous people's homes and gardens. Somewhere I have a book, Requiem for a Red Box, illustrated with photographs of K2 and K6 kiosks in situ, a celebration of their vanishing presence.
After BT's privatisation there was deregulation and other telecom companies came back onto the scene, which explains why there are K6 kiosks in London that are painted black (near The Aldwych, if they're still there).
Of the organisations that had managed to remain independent at the institution of the state monopoly in 1913, the town of Kingston-Upon-Hull had offered a service from 1904. Later using modified K6 boxes (though, not being part of the monopoly, the embossed crown was removed from their design) painted cream, they were operated by the municipality (Hull Corporation). Hull's service was privatised in 1999, acquired and run by KCOM who, again through public pressure, retained at least some of the K6s in Hull's original, cream, paint job.
On the last occasion I was on holiday in Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands and a Crown Dependency) about twenty years ago, their K6s were yellow (and their post boxes ultramarine blue, but that's another story). Like the mainland town above, the local authorities ran the service independently of the GPO. They divested themselves of the service, turning it over to private enterprise in about 2000 (I gather the phone boxes are now blue, the trademark colour of current owner, Cable and Wireless).
Below is a slightly modified yellow K6 kiosk and a blue pillar box that I photographed in Guernsey in the early 1990s. As remarked, smaller glazing panels were sometimes replaced, in the 1970s, with a single large pane (and notice there is no crown in the pediment above the telephone sign). BTW, the broken projection atop the blue pillar box would originally have been a curved bracket holding a large oval sign indicating the direction of the nearest Post Office.
The Channel Islands were not the only location for blue post boxes. At one time in the past, on the "mainland" UK, urban post boxes were red, rural boxes were green and there was a brief flirtation with blue boxes for Air Mail. They're nearly all red now, of course, but two blue boxes remain (one of which is in Windsor), though I believe they are now for general use. At the time of the 2012 summer Olympic Games, which were held in London, a number of pillar boxes were repainted gold in the hometowns of British gold medal winners. The original idea was that they should return to their original red at some later date. However, the initiative was popular, and the boxes have remained gold, (with very poorly designed commemorative plaques crudely affixed later). Coincidentally, Guernsey's neighbour, the tiny island of Sark—with only one pillar box on the whole island—had it painted gold in honour of Carl Hester's success in equestrian Olympic events in 2012.
Similarly, there is only one K6 on Sark. It was painted green. It's obvious from this photograph that the absence of the crown from Channel Island kiosks wasn't consistent, even though the GPO weren't the service providers. Earlier depictions on postcards show this box with original K6 glazing.
Sark is, as you can see, a dusty old place. The roads are no more than dirt tracks as no motor vehicles, aside from tractors, are allowed on the island. There are many bicycles.
Outside of the Channel Islands, C&W also ventured a stake in mainland telecoms when the former monopoly was privatised in the 1980s.
The market then being open to competition, others began to run services in addition to the newly liberated British Telecom. One was Mercury, a specially created subsidiary of C&W. Its kiosk aesthetic was pillar-mounted equipment with a hideous, over-yet-under-designed, transparent hood/booth in the shape of an ogee arch. Perhaps thankfully (at least for aesthetic reasons), C&W had retired from the UK public telecommunications scene by 1999.
The other main outside player was New World Payphones which, I understand, is still in the game, and to whom black-painted former GPO K6 boxes belong.
On arriving in the UK market, as well as the oddly sombre chromatic modification to their acquired K6s, they also introduced a design which appeared to be an unattractive, acid-fuelled hybrid of the historic red boxes and BT's modern "KX" replacements (of which more in a moment). Probably more practical than the familiar boxes, having lightweight folding doors and more internal space, it was painted a red so warm that it was effectively orange, with egg-yolk-yellow trim and signage. I do not know, but I hope that if any examples remain, they have been repainted in New World's less alarming dark palette. They are, however, beginning a roll-out of newly designed kiosks as replacements, the appearance of which maintain design cues from the BT K6 (as demonstrated by this example in Edgeware).
BT's KX boxes were neutrally coloured, the ultimate utilitarian replacements for the red K6. In many practical ways praiseworthy, their problem was an absence of aesthetic character: in 2001, The Guardian newspaper suggested that BT "has done its utmost to turn the phone box from one of the most famous and elegant pieces of street furniture into the most boringly ugly". The later addition of a red, illuminated, moulded plastic top to the decidedly "boxicular" KX, in order to mimic the domed tops of the iconic K6, didn't help.
Here's a clipping from the London listings magazine Time Out at the time of the height of K6 removal, illustrating the cultural discomfiture we all felt:
This week's announcement by British Telecom of the imminent removal of most of London's remaining red telephone boxes has provoked a row with local council planning officers, who object to what they see as BT's "cavalier disregard" for a fundamental part of London's street scenery. Dominic West, Planning Officer for Camden, an authority intent on keeping as many as possible of the old boxes, described BT's attitude as "dismissive and unhelpful". "All we can do is to slap Building Preservation Notices on the best examples to gain breathing space for proper consultation. We see the boxes as architecturally complementary." British Telecom says it intends to keep 200 boxes in "sensitive areas", but it is a strangely arbitrary figure, especially since the Department of the Environment has already listed 200 early K2 models (Gilbert Scott's 1924 design) as buildings of special interest. This could mean the virtual extinction of the later K6 model (1936), the box most familiar to Londoners in non-central areas. Clive Aslet of the Thirties Society, describes BT's policy as a "juggernaut out of control... BT have taken over a valuable heritage on behalf of the nation and should be answerable to the widespread public desire to retain traditional boxes." |
Though there are still—of course—red phone boxes around Britain, they become progressively redundant through mobile phone ownership. Many, kept for cultural eye candy, are repurposed by their local community for quaint uses such as tiny libraries or floral displays.
Increasingly they are converted to contain emergency defibrillators: a good and practical idea.
These two K6s are situated by the entrance at Brighton pier. Meeting the fate of many contemporary boxes, they are no longer available for purposes of communication, as they were here. Instead, they now serve as kiosks for the display of beachwear and associated seaside paraphernalia for sale.
Above and below left are two, earlier K2s for comparison, situated near the Royal Free Hospital in London, one still in use for communications, the other now a coffee vendor's location.
Above right are two recently painted K6 boxes still in original use in Edgeware. And below, St Albans.
As loved as they are by native and tourist alike, many were not pleasant to use in their heyday: in an age when most adults smoked cigarettes, their interiors stank like damp ashtrays (or worse, as they were also used by drunks as urinals), the heavy, cast metal doors were difficult even for the able-bodied to open, they were costly to maintain and they were—increasingly frequently—vandalised out of use.
All the same, there's no doubting their continued visual appeal.