One hundred years of phone boxes Justin Warshaw
On the centenary of the K1 kiosk, barrister Justin Warshaw made a spectacular discovery about the beloved K6 model
Kis for kiosk. The word is borrowed from the Ottomans for the ornate but functional covered stalls found nationwide by the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, and has been adopted by the nascent telecoms industry to describe the housing for public telephones.
The red telephone box – or, more properly, kiosk – is among the most enduring and ubiquitous of British symbols. Over 70,000 were installed, of which some 8,000 remain.
Those left still have a significant impact on our urban spaces and rural landscapes, despite having no modern purpose: you are more likely to see a defibrillator, village library or mini coffee shop in a telephone kiosk than a millennial making a call.
The most common of the survivors is the K6, designed in celebration of George V’s Silver Jubilee on 6th May 1935, but rolled out with good old-fashioned GPO efficiency ten months late – and a few weeks after the king’s funeral. The ‘K’ in the name stands for kiosk.
Five kiosks predated the K6. The first in the series, the K1, was launched in 1921. This year is the centennial of the K series, mother of all our red phone boxes.
In 1896, state control of telecommunications was gradually introduced. By 1913, the GPO had taken over all local telephone companies – except in Hull, which remained independent until the break-up of BT’S monopoly. Telephone kiosks came in many local shapes, colours and sizes, some even with their own attendant.
The GPO had plans for a uniform red kiosk, matching their red-liveried pillar boxes, but the First World War and Spanish flu delayed the process.
The first attempt at uniformity was a pretty drab affair. The K1 looked like a cheap sentry box – a cream-painted, concrete block with a red, wooden door and red window frames. It carried no government or royal logos. It was unpopular and considered crude and old-fashioned. Many London boroughs refused permission for installation on aesthetic grounds.
The K2 was born in 1924, as the result of a competition – between two Scotsmen and one Englishman, called Scott.
The Scottish architect Sir Robert Lorimer produced a fussy design with a Chinese-inspired double roof.
The architect of the King Edward VII wing at the back of the British Museum, Sir John Burnet, proposed a kiosk which looked like a big Beaux-arts lampshade or huge birdcage. The clear winner was Giles Gilbert Scott, architect of the
Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, grandson of George Gilbert Scott, designer of the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station.
Scott’s K2 is a masterpiece of industrial design. Although inspired by Sir John Soane’s tomb in St Pancras Churchyard, it is by no means Soanean or even conventionally classical. It represents an adaptation of Classicism to an unprecedented purpose and outshines its inspiration.
The acme of its melding of utility with art is the perforated Tudor Crown, symbolising authority and modernity while providing ventilation. Scott recommended that his kiosk be painted silver. The GPO ignored Scott’s recommendation; the first K2s appeared on the streets of London in 1926, painted red like the pillar boxes.
They were an instant public hit but were considered too expensive to install outside London, except in grand municipal settings.
Following his success, Scott was commissioned to design a cheaper model for the rest of the country. In 1929, the K3 was launched, a modest concrete version of the K2, with a lowered dome and no room for a crown. The one surviving K3 is next to the Parrot House at London Zoo – a rare bird indeed.
The K4 arrived in 1930, without
Scott’s input. It was a monstrosity: a modified, stretched version of the K2 – a call box and mini post office with stamp machines, post box and grotesque proportions. A handful remain scattered around the country, blocking thoroughfares and obscuring views.
In 1935, the K5, a pop-up, wooden version of the K3 – for temporary use – appeared. Its use was short-lived, and no examples survive.
That same year, Scott was commissioned to produce a kiosk. With the K6, he simplified and altered the design of the K2 to create a cheaper and less obstructive version. The Soanean dome was retained, the reeded fluting removed, the central glazing panels enlarged to improve lighting and the perforated crown replaced with a cast version.
The effect, although less monumental than the K2, is more striking and reflects the developing language of modernity in Scott’s contemporaneous designs, including Battersea Power Station and Cambridge University Library.
The K6 remained in production until 1968 with only two noticeable changes. First, in 1953, the Tudor Crown, used as the kiosk’s regnal symbol by the four preceding kings, was replaced by a St Edward’s Crown to reflect the newly crowned queen’s reversion to the insignia used by Queen Victoria.
Secondly, in 1955, following a bomb attack on a Scottish pillar box by terrorists quaintly but violently protesting against the use of ‘the Second’ to describe their first Queen Elizabeth, modifications were made to allow installation of the Scottish Crown north of the border.
Scott’s K6 was the last proper red telephone box. The K7 was an aluminium horror without a speck of red paint. A dozen were installed in London in 1962. Production went no further.
The last hurrah for the K series entered production in 1968. The K8 was cast iron and red, but there the similarities ended. Some 11,000 of these eyesores were installed. Fewer than 50 survive.
The year 2020 saw a marked increase in new hobbies and home improvement. For me, it was spring-cleaning the dilapidated and heavily graffitied K6 outside my home in Maida Vale. As I jet-washed, I was struck by the integrity and beauty of Scott’s little masterpiece.
On my lockdown perambulations, I paused at every kiosk admiring this prince of street furniture. The crowns never failed to catch my eye.
That’s when I noticed two distinct styles of Tudor Crown on the K6, my favourite kiosk. One was more threedimensional than the other, which was altogether flatter.
I wanted an answer to explain the difference. The K6 was introduced in 1936, the year of three kings. Did the change in style of Tudor Crown reflect a change in monarch observable on the crowns of pillar boxes and military ranks?
To my unbridled excitement, the distinction had not been noticed in the literature or by the experts.
To answer the question, I embarked on a steep learning curve, full of surprises. Who would guess that the majority of kiosks in central London, including the most picturesque K2s in Parliament Square, were installed in the mid-1990s in BT’S response to John Major’s ‘county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs … and old maids’ nostalgia drive?
The reintroduction of these old red kiosks into the wild has left Scottish Crowns scattered randomly on the capital’s streets.
I was schooled in the five kiosk foundries: Lion, Saracen, Carron, Mcdowall Steven and Bratt Colbran. There is just one Mcdowall Steven left in use and only four Bratt Colbrans, one of which I’d jet-washed at the start of my journey.
A kindly telecommunications professor warned me presciently about the perils of my new obsession. One cold December morning, I was caught red-handed inspecting foundry marks on a K6 in Covent Garden by a rival lawyer. I rather hope he thinks I was collecting massage cards.
The hard work paid off. I found the answer to the conundrum. The kiosks manufactured from 1936 to 1953 by the Saracen and Mcdowell Steven foundries all bear the flatter Tudor Crown. T The other foundries use the m more three-d version in that s same period.
What an exciting discovery – made in the nick of time for th the celebration of the K-series ce centennial.