Episode Details

Good Sunday to you,

I am headed to Birmingham and Huddersfield week after next. If you are in either neck of the woods, come and see the show.

Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone

Joni Mitchell

Back in the 1980s I remember the newly privatised British Telecom, in its wisdom, decided to get rid of Britain’s red telephone boxes and replace them with things made of glass or was it perspex?

The originals were designed, I’ve since read, by one Giles Gilbert Scott, who got the gig as a result of a design competition. (I’ve since learned he also designed Battersea Power Station, so he was quality).

British Telecom wanted a rebranding, so somebody at HQ decided to waste lord-knows-how-much money getting rid of however many phone boxes there were around the country - they’re cast iron so this was not an easy job, nor a cheap one - and replace them with something better, which inevitably turned out to be worse.

Here’s the iconic before:

Here’s what they replaced them with:

I barely remember these. You probably don’t either. Because they were soon got rid of and replaced with these.

Why did they bother?

The glass replacements are just so bland you cannot not even describe them as ugly. They are just characterless nothings.

Why people in corporations feel this need to glassify everything - it’s happened to buildings as well, of course - is beyond me. I guess they think it’s “dynamic”. (Indeed, they’ve done something similar to language).

BT justified the rebranding by saying existing phone boxes got vandalised: prostitutes and mini cab drivers left their calling cards in them, people pissed in them. All of this is true, but there were other ways of dealing with these issues. (It’s not unlike the many invented problems being cited today to justify hoisting digital ID on us).

The bottom line is that the powers that be wanted a rebrand. Good for their egos, I guess. And thanks to the privatisation they now had bucket loads of capital to spend on it.

Whatever. They spent a shedload and made it worse.

So there I was walking along Parliament Square the other day and what did I see but a this huge queue of tourists lining up to have their photo taken by a phone box. Not one of the glass ones obviously.

And I mean huge queue.

See for yourself.

I would say there are 40 or more people in that queue. If they each take 45 seconds for their photo, that’s a good 30-minute wait.

The rest of the world loves the English for who we are. For our history, our culture, our style, our character, our charm, our order, our beauty. That’s why so many tourists flock here. Why are we incapable of appreciating ourselves and loving what we have created? - instead choosing to self-hate and apologise for what we have done.

The rest of the world wants the England of red phone boxes, afternoon tea, good manners and Downton Abbey. They don’t want England for its diversity (diversity is not London’s greatest strength, despite what they mayor may tell you - London’s greatest strength is that it is the capital of England, not Diversityland), nor for its gender-neutral toilets, glass fronted buildings, low trust communities or its street crime. They want England for the English.

So the point of today’s missive.

A few years ago somebody got the no-doubt-very-well-paid gig erecting cycle sheds around the capital.

Here was an opportunity to design something iconic, something which added to London - like the old red buses, black taxis, post boxes and, yes, the phone boxes. Things