Red telephone box
The telephone box is a familiar sight on the streets of the United Kingdom, its associated Crown Dependencies, British Overseas Territories and Malta.
[1] In 2006, the K2 telephone box was voted one of Britain's top 10 design icons, which included the Mini, Supermarine Spitfire, London tube map, World Wide Web, Concorde and the AEC Routemaster bus.
Because of widespread dissatisfaction with the GPO's design, the Metropolitan Boroughs Joint Standing Committee organised a competition for a superior one in 1923, but the results were disappointing.
[14] The invitation had come at the time when Scott had been made a trustee of Sir John Soane's Museum: his design for the competition was in the classical style, but topped with a dome reminiscent of those designed by Soane for his own family mausoleum in St Pancras Old Churchyard, and for the mausoleum for Sir Francis Bourgeois at Dulwich Picture Gallery, both in London.
[15] However, Gavin Stamp thinks it "unlikely" that Scott was directly inspired by either of these precedents, arguing instead that "a dome above segmental curves is, in fact, a logical solution to the geometrical problem of designing a sculptural termination to a square pillar when a flat top is not suitable".
[17] A rare surviving K3 kiosk can be seen beside the Penguin Beach exhibit at ZSL London Zoo, where it has been protected from the weather by the projecting eaves and restored to its original colour scheme.
Some contemporary reports said the noise of the stamp-machines in operation disturbed phone-users, and the rolls of stamps in the machines became damp and stuck together in wet weather.
[23] The design was again by Scott, and was essentially a smaller and more streamlined version of the K2, intended to be produced at a considerably cheaper cost, and to occupy less pavement space.
The Post Office was forced into allowing a less strident grey with red glazing bars scheme for areas of natural and architectural beauty.
A supplementary way of identifying the manufacturer is by means of casting marks on the various component parts – i.e. LF, CC, MF, MS and BC – which were used to various extents over the years.
However, since the early 1990s, when the heritage value of red kiosks began to be widely recognised, British Telecom picked out the crowns (on both K2s and K6s) in gold paint.
[34] In the House of Commons, Mark Lennox-Boyd MP asked Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher if she would treat the decision "with the greatest possible dismay".
[36] In January 1985, Nick Kane, the Director of Marketing for BT Local Communications Services announced that the old red telephone boxes would be replaced because they "...no longer meet the needs of our customers.
[38] Many local authorities used legislation designed to protect buildings of architectural or historic importance to keep old telephone boxes in prominent locations and around 2,000 of them were given listed status.
The InLink stations, renamed "Street Hubs" by BT after InLinkUK Ltd failed,[42] provide free public Wi-Fi, phone calls and device charging.
The kiosk may be used for any legal purpose other than telephony and the contract of sale[48] includes the following clause 5.5.4: The buyer shall covenant not to sell, lease or license the Goods to a competitor to the Seller nor to permit a competitor to install electronic communications apparatus (as defined in schedule 2 of the Telecommunications Act 1984) within the Goods or itself (as the Buyer) shall not install, provide or operate any form of electronic communications apparatus (as defined in schedule 2 of the Telecommunications Act 1984) within the Goods.It is likely that BT wishes to prohibit the kiosk from being re-used for electronic communications because they retain trade mark rights in the boxes in relation to telecommunication services and such use might be assumed to be provided by BT, which would confuse consumers as to the source of the services provided.
The Gallery has featured a range of exhibitions of both notable artists and photographers (Tessa Bunney, Martin Parr, Mariana Cook) and local community groups.
Following a competition by a Girl Guide unit in 2011 to find a use for their local disused telephone box in Glendaruel, Argyll, it has been fitted with a defibrillator.
Similar installations have been made in many other places, including Loweswater, Cumbria,[57][58] Auchenblae, Aberdeenshire, Withernwick, East Riding of Yorkshire, and Witney, Oxfordshire.
[62][63][64] From October 2014, several of London's disused K6 telephone boxes have been painted green and converted to free mobile phone chargers named Solarboxes.
[69] Many K3 phone boxes survive in Portugal, where they were exported by the Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company, and where the climate was less harmful to their concrete fabric than in Britain.
[71] British K6 phone boxes are to be found, painted green, in the centre of Kinsale, a historic town in County Cork in the Republic of Ireland.
Red telephone boxes are also found across Malta, some islands of the West Indies such as Antigua, Barbados, as well as in Cyprus, showing that the colonial influence is still present.
[73] In 2008, K6 telephone boxes were imported from the United Kingdom to the Israeli city of Petah Tikva and installed on its main street, Haim Ozer.
Guernsey Telecoms painted its kiosks yellow with white window frames; they were repainted in blue when the company was sold to Cable and Wireless in 2002.
[81] In film it features in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Blackmail (1929) when Frank (John Longden) reveals a glove that Alice (Anny Ondra) left behind at the scene of a murder inside the phone box of her father’s tobacco store.
[82] It appears in a scene in the 1955 black comedy The Ladykillers where a motley gang of crooks led by Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) cram into one.
[83] In 2016, British chef Gordon Ramsay opened a British-themed fish restaurant in the Las Vegas Strip, with the doors to the entrance resembling the red telephone box.
In 2012, BT helped celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UK's free-phone charity ChildLine by commissioning eighty artists to design and decorate full-sized K6 replicas.
Artists included Peter Blake, Willie Christie, David Mach, Denis Masi, Zaha Hadid and Ian Ritchie.
