I live in a tiny village in that green and snug part of northern England called the Yorkshire Dales. It’s a pretty village, in a quiet and unassuming sort of way. It has a pub, a 500-year-old church, a clutch of stone cottages mostly dating from the 1600s, a bridge over a stream, a bench thoughtfully provided for anyone who passes, not that anyone much does, and that’s about it.
Oh, yes, and a red phone booth. But that goes without saying. After all, what English village would be complete without its poppy-red phone booth standing proud and stately beside the corner post office or village green?
The red phone booth seems such a timeless feature of the British landscape that it can come as a surprise to realize it has been around only 60-odd years—a mere eye blink by British standards. It was designed in 1924 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a leading architect of his day who was normally preoccupied with more monumental projects like Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station, a hulking edifice that still stands as a landmark along the Thames River in London.
Scott’s brief for the phone booth was to come up with something that was sturdy, functional, and clearly visible from a long way off (hence the bright red color). Almost any simple design for an upright structure would have done, but rather than build yet another of the unimaginative glass boxes that other nations favored, Scott came up with something dashing and memorable: a cast-iron sentry box with a gently domed roof, a stately profile and 18 small, equal-sized windows on three of its four sides. For reasons that now seem to be forgotten, it was called the K2. In 1936, Scott introduced a slightly squatter, lighter, and cheaper-to-build version called the K6.
Alas, British Telecom, the private company that has been running the phone system in Britain since 1985, doesn’t like the old red boxes—it claims they are costly to paint and maintain, easily vandalized, and unwieldy to use—and it has been systematically retiring them.
Sometime in the next four years, if all goes according to plan, a British Telecom crew will come with a small crane and take our lovely old red phone booth away. In its place they will leave a modern glass-and-aluminum box that has all the intrinsic beauty of, say, a vending machine.
Something that was in its small way central to the charm and character of our village will have disappeared forever and been replaced by a shower stall. By 1996, this same sad fate will befall all but a token smattering of the 50,000 or so other red phone booths scattered across Britain.
