12/24/2023 0 Comments Uk phonebox outline![]() Scott’s K2 design, easily identified by its small, square windows, was superseded in 1936 by his K6, which was smaller and had larger, horizontal windows to let more light into the box. “The Kiosk No 2 was a miniature building,” he writes. In his book he lauds Scott’s original design, designated Kiosk No 2 (usually abbreviated to K2) by the General Post Office, which was then responsible for the phone network. Stamp was a great enthusiast for Scott’s boxes and led a campaign to preserve them after they ceased production in 1968. In his 1989 monograph on phone boxes, the architectural historian Gavin Stamp called Scott’s cast-iron box “a classical design of refined sophistication and timeless elegance”. Many believe Scott’s design echoes the tomb that the architect Sir John Soane built for his wife in 1815. It was designed in 1924 by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, whose other creations include Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral and Battersea and Bankside power stations. In 2015 the traditional red phone box was voted the greatest British design of all time, ahead of the Routemaster bus, the Spitfire, the union jack and Concorde. It was a point he has made at past AGMs – always, he says, to audience applause. At the recent annual general meeting of British Telecom, which even in the age of the mobile phone has a statutory obligation to maintain a payphone network, Farmer demanded that more be done to maintain the traditional red boxes. These were once a feature of every high street in the country, but now number only 10,000 or so (and half of those are decorative rather than operational). J ohn Farmer, who describes himself as an activist shareholder, is a man with a mission – to save Britain’s red phone boxes.
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