As with so much in Britain these days, it is all a question of economics. The executives of British Telecom point out that before this move the company was losing $35 million a year on its pay phones and that by changing over to a new, low-maintenance model it could save up to $60 million a year in repair costs.
Only 200 of the original K2s remain, all of them in London, but I am happy to report they will be spared the ignominy of being sold off for scrap or shipped to America to become decorative accessories to cocktail lounges and playrooms. After a public outcry and much pressure from conservation groups, British Telecom agreed to preserve the 200 remaining K2 booths and some 2,000 of the 50,000-odd remaining K6s. It was a decidedly token gesture—only about four of the red phone booths in every hundred will remain—but that is better than nothing.
It is a sad fate for what was universally hailed as a design classic. Scott’s booth brought a dash of color, dignity, and style to even the dullest streets.
But his real achievement was to devise a structure that was at once striking and unexpected and yet could slip effortlessly into any setting. When you think about it, it seems improbable that anything so brightly colored and so necessarily clunky and functional could actually enhance an ancient village or that it could seem quite so at home against such august backdrops as Windsor Castle and Westminster Abbey, but it does. It is a positive enhancement, unlike the new style of booth, which looks cheap and uninspired even against the most featureless of modern office buildings, and which I consider to be nothing less that a travesty when foisted on a historic street or old village.
The British used to show a certain reliable genius for devising everyday objects about which one could feel a kind of fondness—black taxicabs, double-decker buses, pub signs, red mailboxes, and the absurdly impractical but curiously loveable policeman’s helmet (if you have ever seen a bobby chasing a criminal down the street, desperately holding his bobbing helmet to his head with one hand, like a 19th-century matron caught in a sudden squall, you will appreciate how wildly unfunctional those helmets are). Not to mention those ridiculous but strangely appealing little mops they make their judges wear on their heads. These items may not always be terribly efficient or even sensible, but they help to make life in Britain distinctive and agreeable. They are, in their small way, as vital a part of the nation’s heritage as hilltop castles and ancient cathedrals.
I have long suspected that the British may have too much heritage for their own good. They tend to regard it in the same way other nations regard their rainforests, as an inexhaustible resource. But if there is one thing that rainforests and red phone booths have in common it is that once they are gone they are gone forever.
