The Department of Culture recently sponsored ICONS: A Portrait of England, an online collection of cultural icons nominated by the public as well as the great and the good. Writing at the Social Affairs Unit Web Review, Henry Phibbs asserts that ‘many’ of the nominated icons are ‘dead or under attack’, or even ‘things that this government has sought to banish’. Out of 325 nominations, Phibbs only discusses 17 examples, and one of them is the personal choice of David Lammy, Minister for Culture — ‘the red telephone box’. Phibbs comments:

Worthy of inclusion but now scarce on the ground. Only after many had been destroyed did we wake up to their aesthetic merit and start slapping preservation orders on the few that remain.

Red telephone boxes fit uneasily into Phibbs’s screed against New Labour. While thanks to the expansion of household telephones and the rise of the mobile phone, the fate of public call-boxes in general now hangs in the balance, it was Thatcher’s newly privatised BT that notoriously decided to replace the idolised ‘red boxes’ en masse in 1985. For many Conservatives this brought the values of the free market into direct conflict with Old Tory aesthetics. As Keith Miller observed in the Daily Telegraph (‘Making the Grade’, 31 August 2002, 4):

A photograph of the editor of this newspaper [Charles Moore] in his younger days, gazing sadly down at a felled kiosk as if at a vanquished comrade, is reproduced in Gavin Stamp’s brisk, enrage account, Telephone Boxes ([London:] Chatto, 1989). The usual dispensation extended to privatised industries to cut out the deadwood was suspended: this was war.

Indicting the iron lady is a good starting point for any analysis of British politics and culture. But simply blaming privatisation leaves most of the mythology of the ‘red telephone box’ intact. As we shall see, 1985 was an abberation not because of BT’s decision to replace old kiosks, but because of the insistence that this must be done all at once rather than gradually. Experts like Stamp reluctantly recognised this essential point, but it tends to get obscured when red telephone boxes are reduced to just one more item in a catalogue of national woes.

A vermilion parade

Between the introduction of the K1 model in the 1920s and the privatisation of British Telecom in 1984, I estimate around 100,000 K (for ‘kiosk’) series telephone kiosks were installed in Great Britain (although many of these were replacements). If we are to understand BT’s 1985 policy and add detail to the overly broad brushstrokes painted by nostalgia, it is vital to remember that there were actually several incarnations of the ‘red telephone box’. In addition to the classic models designed by Sir Gilbert Scott (the K2 introduced in 1923, the concrete K3 of 1929, and the mass-produced Silver Jubilee kiosk of 1935), we should spare a thought for the thousands of kiosks designed by others. There were the K1s which preceded Scott’s kiosks and continued, in the form of the K1 Mk 236, to be installed as a cheap alternative to the Scott kiosks until the introduction of the K6. The K4 ‘Vermilion Giant’ was brought in in 1927 to provide postal and telephone services from the same box. The wooden K5 was approved for temporary installations in 1934. Neville Conder designed the first aluminium kiosk, the K7, but it proved overly susceptible to the assaults of the British weather when prototyped in 1962. Finally Bruce Martin’s modernised K8 flourished in great numbers from 1968. (Robert Ore has photographs of each K series model at the wonderful www.redphoneboxinfo.com.)

By 1978, according to a contemporary report in The Times, around 60,000 pre-war telephone kiosks (K1, K2, K3, K4, and K6) were still in use along with 17,000 of the newer K8s, but British Telecom was beginning to experiment with new, open designs based on booths in America (‘Aluminium Call Boxes on Trial’, The Times, 15 February 1978, 3). In 1985 British Telecom announced plans to replace almost all of its 76,500 kiosks, although ‘[r]ed kiosks would be kept where there are special local reasons’ (Bill Johnstone, ‘Phone Boxes to Profit from Face-Lift’, The Times, 18 January 1985).

Yet thanks to the efforts of the Thirties Society, English Heritage, and vociferous local residents, there are still around 13,346 K series boxes operational in the UK. The vast majority of these are the beloved Scott models (K2, K3, and K6). This is because the K1 was largely replaced by Scott’s models, and though at least 11,000 K8s were produced, they were not eligible for listing by English Heritage and seem to have never been listed, so there was little to prevent their replacement. In 1989 Stamp declared that ‘it is likely that only about 1,300 Scott kiosks will survive’. Despite or, more fairly, because of such gloomy predictions, Britain still has a 17% of the 76,500 odd K series kiosks it had in 1985, and they make up about 20% of Britain’s 68,000 public call-boxes.

Indeed, the revival of interest in Scott’s design proved so strong that in 1993 BT started installing recycled K6s, sometimes replacing KX units and sometimes in prominent new locations, beginning with 60 or so in Westminster but then spreading to other locations too (Johannessen, p. 27). In 1996 BT even revised its KX 100 kiosks to include a Scott-style domed roof, creating the KX+ (R. Freshwater’s The Telephone File Project includes photographs of the KX call-box designs). BT Payphones now operates around 3,000 ‘red boxes’. Kingston Communications, operating in a city that never joined the national telecommunications industry, still run 239 K6s; while Cable & Wireless service four old K6s in Guernsey. In 1998 New World Payphones (now Spectrum International) began adding black reproduction K6s to the London streets; these now number 54. Thanks to their rise to iconic status, as BT complained to OFCOM in September 2005:

should the public perceive that red boxes are under threat then more requests for boxes to be given listed status would be forthcoming.… Indeed, reaction to BT’s street payphone rationalisation programme has shown a higher level of objections relating to red boxes and greater numbers of applications for listed status being lodged with English Heritage.

The colour of Hades

Although clearly part of a national heritage movement, the desire to save the ‘red’ telephone box is generally discussed in terms of local resistance to the brutally homogenising control of central authority. Ironically, redness could not have become an essential quality of this English icon without a long and insensitive campaign of standardisation waged by the General Post Office against recalcitrant localities. By 1913 the GPO had obtained control over all public telecommunications within the British Isles, with the exceptions of Kingston upon Hull and the Bailiwick of Guernsey. In those days local authorities were allowed to paint new kiosks the colour of their choice. In the 1920s however the GPO seems to have determined to create a more unified brand image. Scott himself envisaged the K2s in silver, but the GPO overruled him and insisted that they should all be painted vermilion red (Neil Johannessen, Telephone Boxes (Shire Album, 303; Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire: Shire, 1st edn. 1994; 2nd edn. 1999), 6, 9). This would ensure their visibility and match the GPO’s post boxes.

At first, Londoners bore the brunt of this decision. In the early 1930s, Reginald Blunt of the Chelsea Society wrote to The Times to complain about red boxes appearing on the bank of the Thames, and Chelsea Borough Council succeeded in pressurising the GPO into repainting the red kiosks on the Chelsea Embankment grey (see Reginald Blunt, ‘Red on the Embankment’, letter to The Times, 5 October 1932, 15; ‘Red Kiosks in Chelsea’, The Times, 29 August 1951, 2; and Basil Marsden-Smedley, ‘Kiosks on Chelsea Embankment’, letter to The Times, 8 September 1951, 7). [Update (1 March 2006, 9.18 a.m.):] In August 1930 it was decided that once stocks of the K1 ran out, the K3 should be used in rural areas but painted grey with red window frames. However, it seems that when the K6 was introduced, the GPO decided that vermilion was now good for the countryside too. But as the cheaper Jubilee kiosks were rolled out into rural areas after 1935, the aesthetic dictats of the GPO met even stiffer opposition. Councillors in the Lake District objected that boxes painted the ‘colour of Hades’ would be a blight on the countryside and forced the GPO to paint some of the kiosks green (see ‘Red Telephone Kiosks’, The Times, 22 August 1936, 8 and ‘Amenities of the Lake District’, The Times, 2 October 1936, 16).

The debate over the proper colour of telephone boxes was suspended for the war, but resumed shortly after. In 1948 the Post Office, the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England agreed that kiosks should be painted the standard red except when sited in a spot of ‘exceptional natural beauty’, where the ‘experts’ recommended ‘battleship grey with window bars and frames outlined in red’ (‘Kiosks To Stay Red’, The Times, 1 April 1948, 2). Despite a growing ‘campaign for more attractive kiosks’ in which ‘different areas … asked for special colours’ (‘Cheerfulness Creeps In’, The Times, 9 April 1948, 5), the GPO began a trenchant regime of red-washing. The grey kiosks of the Chelsea Embankment were repainted red in 1951.

Even after the 1948 decision, there were occasional suggestions that kiosks should be painted yellow instead of red. When British Telecom flirted with painting its 77,000 public telephone kiosks yellow in 1981, it tried out the colour with 69 kiosks in Manchester, Liverpool, and London (‘Yellow Telephone Kiosks Tested’, The Times, 11 February 1981, 5). This provoked Bruce Martin, designer of the K8 kiosks, into explaining his rejection of yellow in 1965 to The Times (‘Seeing Red’, letter to The Times, 14 February 1981):

I turned the idea down at that time on the reasonable grounds that the colour red is associated with royalty and the Crown, is the standard colour for kiosks in this country, is easy to recognize in time of need or in a strange place, and is a dark hue that does not readily show dirt as would yellow.

A few days later, Walter Strachan, a man of letters and friend of Henry Moore, provided an early example of the incorporation of the red telephone box into a chocolate-box vision of the British landscape (W. J. Strachan, ‘Seeing Red’, letter to The Times, 17 February 1981, 13): ‘[a]lthough the scheme to repaint our red telephone kiosks is at an experimental stage, may I raise one voice against any replacement of “pillar-box red”, quickly identifiable and aesthetically pleasing (the “red note” beloved of Constable against a country background) by village greens and an agreeable contrast against most building materials in urban settings.’

This imagery proved so appealing that the listing of telephone boxes after 1985 resulted in some kiosks, including five near Marble Arch, being changed from grey to red: ‘[w]here grey was once the only acceptable colour in places of special beauty, red is now the required colour’ (Johannessen, 24). The cream-coloured K6s of Kingston Communications and the blue telephone boxes of Cable & Wireless Guernsey, which were yellow with white around the window frame until Guernsey Telecoms was purchased from the local government in 2002, eloquently testify to the colourful variety that might have been.

A long view of 1985

There is more than one possible view of British Telecom’s notorious 1985 policy of wholesale replacement of kiosks with open American-style booths. At the very least, we should view it in context as a continuation of much earlier trends as well as a reflection of the concerns of its own time.

In the early 1920s the GPO faced heavy resistance in its efforts to introduce the K1 from London Boroughs. Eastbourne Council famously insisted on replacing the roofs with thatching. Finally a competition was held to find a more aesthetically pleasing replacement. As Stamp observed of the 1980s attempt to save the classic telephone kiosks: ‘it was like the campaign against the K1 in the early 1920s all over again — except that this time the fight against an ugly kiosk ended in defeat rather than victory’ (p. 23). After Scott produced the ‘sufficiently ornamental’ K2 (‘Better Telephone System’, The Times, 28 December 1925, 21), he had to redesign it twice to cut production costs, creating first the concrete K3s in 1929 then the still cheaper K6s in 1935. But by 1950, what had once been seen as a successful recapitulation of old design for modern conditions, began to be criticised by more self-consciously modernist architects who regarded Scott’s decoration of ‘telephone kiosks with the fenestration of eighteenth-century villas’ as ‘quite unrelated to the spirit and techniques of the time’ (Michael Brawne et al., ‘Architectural Styles’, letter to the The Times, 31 October 1950, 5). Indeed by 1959 the General Secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union was describing the kiosks as ‘antediluvian in design and decoration’ (‘ “Shabby and Dirty” Telephone Kiosks’, The Times, 10 June 1959, 14).

The proliferation of boxes exposed the problems of mass usage. Neville Conder’s 1958 K7 design, constructed of aluminium, was more expensive to make, but cheaper to maintain. At the same time, the claim that it would be ‘better ventilated’ (‘Better Ventilated Telephone Kiosks’, The Times, 18 December 1958, 6) spoke to commonly voiced complaints about the Scott kiosks (see, for example, Adelaide D. L. Makower, ‘Telephone Kiosks’, letter to The Times, 3 August 1935, 11; A. Harrison Ford, ‘Telephone Kiosks’, letter to The Times, 7 August 1935, 11; and ‘Small Change’, The Times, 2 October 1951, 7). Early users of telephone boxes were scared of catching infections from the handset. Dismissing this fear as non-scientific, a Times columnist nonetheless provides an unappealing description of the (im)practicalities of using a public call-box (‘No Germs on Call’, The Times, 29 March 1949, 5):

After railway waiting-rooms, telephone kiosks take precedence over all over public places of assembly for dirt and discomfort. … Kiosks … seek to placate by a name with a misleading hint in it of Persian palaces and by a gaily painted exterior. … Once the would-be caller has persuaded that awkward door to close, he is left with the impatient eyes of the queue upon him and the sounds of the outer world imperfectly muffled. He will be lucky if he finds himself a receptacle in which the lights work and the directory musters all its volumes with all their pages untorn.

In the 60s the costs of wear and tear were compounded by the growth of vandalism. Sidney R. Campion, Head of Press and Broadcast Division at GPO Headquarters from 1940 to 1957, explained that the decision to install mirrors in the K6 followed consultation with a psychologist and was aimed at distracting those who would otherwise incline to graffiti (‘The Mirror Trick’, letter to The Times, 19 March 1965, 15). But the vandalisation of telephone boxes did not make it into The Times until 1961 (‘Wilful Damage to Telephone Kiosks’, 24 February 1961, 6). By 1965 vandalism helped contribute to the service losing £4.2 million a year (‘Catching The Telephone Vandal’, The Times, 9 December 1965, 6) and by 1977 it was the subject of serious sociological research (R. I. Mawby, ‘Kiosk Vandalism: A Sheffield Study’, British Journal of Criminology, 17 (1977), 30–46).

The threat of wilful damage was directly reflected in designs from the 60s on. The roof-to-floor glass panes of the 1965 K8 design were intended to deter vandals by exposing them to public view (‘New Telephone Kiosk’, The Times, 14 July 1966, p. 1). It needed only 50 parts where the K6 needed 400. In 1978 British Telecom trialed brightly lit, unenclosed booths made of aluminium and glass as a possible successor to the K series (‘Aluminium Call Boxes on Trial’, The Times, 15 February 1978, p. 3).

In 1985 and the following years, British Telecom justified its decision to replace the old kiosks in terms of electronicisation, the reduction of vandalism, and better access for the elderly and the disabled. Stamp insisted that ‘BT’s priority was not efficiency, or good design, merely the vain pursuit of a new corporate image’ (p. 22). It was certainly easy to suggest that new machinery could be installed in old kiosks, but even Stamp struggled to deal with the problems of guaranteeing disabled access (p. 23):

It may be true that the Scott kiosks, on their bases, are not accessible to the disabled in wheelchairs, but they are preferred by other categories of the disabled, such as the hard of hearing and the partially sighted. The argument about kiosks is not about efficiency, but about the quality of public design, of street furniture.

A surprisingly healthy icon

As recently as 1972, when the General Household Survey began, only 42% of households had a telephone. But in the UK today, 98% of households have some sort of phone, 92% of households have at least one fixed telephone and 79% have at least one mobile telephone (National Statistics, General Household Survey 2004: Overview Report, 2). Consequently, usage of kiosks has fallen dramatically. Wheraas in 1949 queuing was a remarked feature of using a kiosk, nowadays fewer people use kiosks, and less often. According to OFCOM surveys, in February 2004 only 37% of people 15 or older claimed to be using phone-boxes at all (down from 44% in November 2000) and only 7% to use them once a month or more (down from 12%). It is not altogether surprising that BT is seeking to cut the number of kiosks rather than raise it, removing about 20,500 public call-boxes between March 2002 and January 2005. It’s not clear exactly how this affects the underprivileged who tend to use public telephones, since BT still runs a total of 75,000 public payphones.

Those who continue to pine for the old red boxes in 2006 might do well to remember that Stamp, for one, was no opponent of change (p. 28): ‘[t]he defence of the Scott telephone kiosk was not an exercise in nostalgia, a sentimental protest at yet another change in the public face of Great Britain and at the extinction of a harmless and enjoyable survival from the past.’ Rather it was a defence of the principle that the ‘utilitarian need not be ugly.’

Though he hated the newest designs on aesthetic grounds and objected to the wasteful uprooting of perfectly serviceable and beautiful old telephone boxes, Stamp recognised that times must move on and that designs would change, approving of the modernising K8 for example (pp. 19—20). Public telephone kiosks have rarely been particularly profitable, but their continuing utility depends on their adaptation to new purposes.

Arguably, the fact that the design of around a fifth of our telephone kiosks dates from more than 40 years ago (production of the K6 ceased in the early 60s) is evidence of a surprisingly lively national icon. At least 5 K1s, 213 K2s, 2 K3s, 5 K4s, 4 K5s, and 2,101 K6s are listed as historical monuments in the National Monuments Record database. That 2,330 telephone boxes are under government protection seems a cause for celebration by lovers of classic design, not despair.

Notes and acknowledgements

The rough total of 100,000 K series kiosks ever installed in Britain was estimated using the following figures:

1. In 1934 6,300 K1s were still in service while 1,700 K2s and 12,000 K3s had been installed (Stamp, 3).
2. 50 K3s were manufactured between 1930 and 1935 (ibid., 12).
3. 60,000 K6s were installed by the mid-1960s (ibid., 13).
4. By 1983 11,000 K8s had been produced (ibid., 20).
5. Kingston Communications currently have 239 proudly crownless K6s and a lonely, inoperative, and green K1.
6. Spectrum International operates 54 K6s in London.
7. Cable & Wireless Guernsey run four K6 kiosks.

This produces a total of 91,348, but I suspect this falls somewhat short of the real number, especially as Stamp’s figures do not seem intended to be comprehensive and are sometimes difficult to reconcile entirely with other sources. For example, one of The Times articles I cite above claims that there were more like 17,000 K8s installed. Conversely, the Virtual Tour of the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings at Connected Earth asserts that only 4,000 were installed, although I suspect that reflects a misunderstanding of Johannessen’s statement that 4,000 were supplied in the 1970s alone (p. 19).

With regards to the figures from the NMR database, be warned that they are taken from a live dataset and subject to change, and that not all records necessarily mention the model number. Consequently, it is conceivable that BT Payphones are correct in their belief that about 3,000 of their ‘red boxes’ are listed by English Heritage.

I would like to thank BT Archives and BT Payphones, the NMR, Kingston Communications, Cable & Wireless Guernsey, and Spectrum International for helping me with my queries. In addition to the other sources already mentioned, I should also refer the curious reader to John Timpson, Requiem for a Red Box (London: Pyramid, 1989).