The telephone box is largely defunct, and its purpose will soon vanish into history. But like horse troughs, gas lamps and coal plates, it remains an intensely evocative reminder of how we used to live.
With the possible exception of the US fire hydrant, no item of street furniture is more celebrated than Giles Gilbert Scott’s chubby art deco-ish telephone kiosks, which first appeared in Britain around 100 years ago. In the mid-1980s, Scott’s scarlet booths came close to extinction; today, about 3,000 historic boxes remain in working order. More than 11,000 K1 – K8s survive, many of them protected, but only because campaigners and preservationists understood the subtle genius of Scott’s design.
Now, visitors to the Sir John Soane Museum can see for themselves the detailed attention Scott paid to his telephone box, in a tiny, fragile pencil sketch of the K6 – or “Jubilee” – kiosk he made in 1935. The drawing, which has never been exhibited before, is part of a wider exhibition on Soane’s influence on modernist architects and designers working a century after his death in 1837. It traces the Bank of England architect’s ideas and impact on buildings from Golden Lane, a 1950s London housing estate by Alison and Peter Smithson, to the Sydney Opera House. But Scott’s telephone box is the star example.
Architecture is divisive and even politicised, often reduced to a fight between traditionalists and modernists. Scott’s design reminds us it doesn’t have to be that way. The telephone box manages to transcend stylistic squabbles to signify tradition and modernity in one structure. “The Jubilee is both elegant and poetic,” as Soane Museum assistant curator Erin McKellar puts it. “It has a presence without dominating.”
“A stately, temple-like quality,” is how Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society – the pressure group whose predecessor led preservation efforts in the 1980s – describes the appeal of Scott’s design. Croft even digs out a statement issued by the society in the mid-1980s, which called for the preservation of Scott’s booths and highlighted how essential they were for rural communities: “In the countryside, they are a point of stability and familiarity: an industrial object acclimatised to our roadsides.”
Popular culture seized on Scott’s creation, from Michael Caine stranded in a Newcastle booth in the 1971 film Get Carter, to David Bowie on the back cover of his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The red telephone box is a lantern in the dark. It may be confined, even claustrophobic, yet at the same time it is expansive, a portal to the rest of the world, a beacon of civilisation open to all.
Scott’s 1936 sketch was a design refresh for his original, highly successful K2 telephone box, which first appeared on British streets in 1926 after Scott won a design competition held by the General Post Office (GPO). In between came K3 to the K5, but the K6 was much smaller and simplified, with fewer glass panes and lines surrounding the door that would make it cheaper to produce than the K2, especially outside London. By 1940, 35,000 kiosks had been deployed.
Scott had also designed Battersea Power Station A in London and most of Liverpool Cathedral by the mid-1930s – slabby landmarks with different purposes, but both setting out to impose themselves on the urban landscape; he would later design Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern) on the south bank of the Thames. But with his telephone box, Scott was aiming for something else: a standard architectural form painted red (except for in Hull, where the same boxes are cream because the local council ran the network, instead of the Post Office), instantly recognisable and accessible to everyone, yet subtle enough to meld into every street and landscape.
What Scott came up with was a pared-down classicism, a booth modern enough to be mass-produced, robust enough to shelter the latest communications technology, with subtle decorative elements that interpreted – but not mimicked – familiar British architecture. Many design historians believe Scott based the K2 and K6 on Soane’s tomb, which Soane designed in 1816 for Eliza, his wife, in St Giles in the Fields burial ground, now St Pancras Gardens, in London.
The most obvious similarity is the gently domed roof, which Soane called a canopy – shallow and unobtrusive rather than upright and domineering like that of St Paul’s Cathedral. Writing in 1929, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the architectural historian, admired the “virtuosity” of Soane’s tomb, particularly its ornament of incised lines, which Soane used to accentuate the structure.
In the exhibition, Scott’s tiny drawing is placed next to Soane’s original tomb sketch. McKellar says there is no contemporaneous evidence that Scott borrowed his telephone box design from the tomb; he doesn’t mention it in his writings. But she thinks he probably did.
“Art deco is still fundamentally tied to the strict classicism that Soane was engaging with a century earlier,” she says. “To me, a person who sits in the Soane Museum all day, Scott’s telephone box feels very Soanian.”
Scott, too, spent a lot of time in Soane’s museum. He was a trustee of the architect’s former house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “That shallow dome appears throughout,” says McKellar. “You can see it everywhere, from the ceiling of the breakfast room to the clock Soane designed also for the room. It appears large and small throughout his work – it’s almost his calling card.”
Scott’s telephone boxes may be cherished today, but there was a time when they came close to extinction in the name of progress. Exactly 40 years ago on February 5th 1985, the Thirties Society – the forerunner of the Twentieth Century Society – sounded the alarm. More than 76,000 kiosks were about to be scrapped. The newly privatised British Telecom – now BT – had inherited Scott’s street furniture, and said his booths were no longer fit for use.
According to a report in the Spectator, published in February 1985, the company announced “the new British Telecom will take a radical approach to the problems inherent in today’s outdated payphone service” and create “a payphone service for the 21st century”. Scott’s boxes were too expensive, too difficult to clean and inaccessible to disabled people.
“This is largely nonsense,” the architectural historian Gavin Stamp, a founding member of the Thirties Society, fired back in the same article. “British Telecom seems to hate all those old boxes and symbols of their GPO past which are irrelevant to their exciting future…. The important fact is that the Scott kiosks are visually of extraordinary high quality. And the proposed new boxes are nowhere near as good.”
The proposed new boxes were virtually featureless glass and steel canopies with yellow stripes – the KX100 – defended by British Telecom as vandal-proof and wheelchair accessible. They were square, clinical and wildly unpopular – a design devoid of Scott’s careful charm. But British Telecom got its way, and most of Scott’s booths were decommissioned. Some were reconditioned and sold to the public. Fortunately, following a campaign by the Thirties Society, thousands were saved on the streets and from 1986 onwards they began to be listed by successive heritage bodies. Today, more than 3,000 K6 booths are protected by Historic England
“It has been, without doubt, the society’s most successful ever campaign,” says Croft. “Both numerically, in terms of the sheer number of kiosks that have been saved but also in the way it has given people a voice in what happens on their own high street or village green.”
In the mobile age, we barely need phone boxes at all. The society’s campaign has evolved accordingly to take in the preservation of a few of the once-hated KX100 steel canopies, which it describes as the “final flourish of design-led telecommunications infrastructure in the public realm”. BT now runs a scheme encouraging people to adopt Scott-designed telephone boxes – more than 6,600 have been saved since 2008. Long stripped of their Bakelite receivers and the rest of the communications technology, the scarlet shells often serve as community libraries, farm shops, food banks and micro art galleries.
You can even buy them – for a price. Unicorn Restorations, a Surrey company, sells restored boxes to the public. Its estate, located near Merstham, Surrey, looks something like a telephone-box graveyard. A fully restored K6, complete with original signage, brass light fitting and original Bakelite telephone in working order, could be yours for £8,500.
Meanwhile, Soane’s tomb, complete with its shallow canopy replicated thousands of times on one of the most admired pieces of street furniture in the world, can still be found in St Pancras’s burial ground.
What would Soane have made of the telephone box? “You can imagine him saying, why would you copy my tomb?” says McKellar. “But we know he celebrated new technology, and it’s easy to see him enjoying telecommunications, mass production and seeing those things as ultimately good. He would love the idea of seeing Soanian forms everywhere.”
Make It New: Soane and Modernism is at the Sir John Soane Museum from February 12th