Over the years the red telephone box has become a symbol of British life: it is loved both by tourists and by collectors from all over the world.
gilbert & george...
The first red telephone box, the ‘K1’ (Kiosk 1) appeared in 1920. In 1924 the Post Office held a competition to design a replacement for it. It was won by the famous architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Over the next few years Sir Giles produced more models (the K3, K4 and K5), but his most popular version, the K6, was created for King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 (although it didn’t go into production until the following year). The K6 is the red phone box that we all love today.
Sadly, the K6 has become an endangered species. These famous red phone boxes are disappearing from our streets and, because nobody is using the ones that remain, they are losing money.
The reason is very simple: the mobile phone. As Yusuf King (see interview) of British Telecom explains, pay phones actually enjoyed a boom in the 1980s, but they faced a major crisis at the end of the 1990s. This coincided with mobile phone mania (in 1999 a new mobile phone was sold every four seconds in Britain).
dramatic DECLINE
During the last five years calls from pay phones have dropped by more than 80 per cent. 10 years ago there were 92,000 public pay phones in the UK: today there are 51,500. Of these, only 11,000 are traditional K6s. BT (British Telecom) realise that people love the K6 and it has organised some original projects to save it. As Yusuf King explains, the ‘Adopt a Kiosk’ campaign, which was launched in 2008, has been a great success. A phone box can be ‘adopted’ for £1 and so far more than 1,500 boxes have been transformed into (very small) art galleries, information centres, public libraries, showers and even toilets!
BT artBOX
The K6 is also a symbol of London and this summer at least 80 kiosks in the capital underwent a make-over. The artists involved in the BT Artbox project included Sir Peter Blake (who is most famous for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover), architect Zaha Hadid and model and actress Lily Cole. They did this in order to raise funds for Childline (the 24-hour counselling service), which celebrated it 25th anniversary this year.
The designs included a sofa, a ‘Big Ben’ phone box and a wholly knitted kiosk. They were displayed on the streets of London for one month and then auctioned off at Sotheby’s.
the collector
And, when not selling red phones boxes to local communities in the UK for £1, British Telecom also sells them to international buyers (there are collectors in Russia, China and the USA). But here the prices are a little different: they start at £1,950.
Impara di più insieme ad un esperto (con audio): The Phone Box: In the Red