"In the 70s I was a student living in Liverpool , my girlfriend (now my wife) was in Cardiff, if we were lucky enough, we could find a faulty red phone booth, 10 p at a time Keep playing forever until we are interrupted by her friend. Our love song is the "Phone Line" of the Electric Symphony Orchestra, and it is still the case. "
"One Day"
K2 located at the entrance of the Royal Academy of Art in London, Andrew Testa
For the British, the highly recognizable "a touch of red" telephone booth has long become the "cultural symbol" of the UK, carrying the indelible ones for generations. memory.
Handmade coffee and locally made pastries have replaced the phones of this kiosk in north London, Andrew Testa
Historical memory
"In the 1980s, I lived in a 'university town' in Nottingham , every Sunday morning, two There are long queues outside the telephone booth, and the students just call home on time to sign up for good morning! ”
In fact, in addition to the phone itself, the phone ringtone, as auditory memory, is always left in people's minds.
@Pete Read Photographed in London after the 1987 storm in
"In the early 1990s, I lived in a shared house in Manchester . Next to the living room window was a red telephone booth, and we would tell friends its phone number, You can hear its ringtone in the house, and it will ring about 5-10 times a night. It's a great public facility."
Each red phone booth has its own number. Once upon a time, you could use it to communicate with friends; now, you can use it to spoof friends. When my grandmother was waiting for her friend to pass by the phone booth, she rang it. She watched from a distance and looked around for a while, walked towards the phone booth hesitantly, and finally picked up the microphone carefully. This is already a classic plot of the famous British funny show Fonejacker.
©alexander_shootz
Of course, telephone booths can not only be used for chatting, but also for radio. In the past, people would make specific calls in red phone booths and listen to a song they like on the popular charts several times; or they could also satisfy people's imagination of urban strange stories, such as when the "Yorkshire Ripper" was out of order, there was a passage. The recording claimed to be him, and this recording could be heard by dialing a phone call at the telephone booth.
html Children in the 170s would find a telephone booth on the way to school and use "professional equipment" to take out coins stuck in broken coin slots. If you are lucky, you will have snacks for a few weeks.
When he grew up, he started talking on the phone in the phone booth and chatting with the people he missed all night.
In 2015, the red telephone booth was rated as the greatest design ever in the UK, surpassing even the red buses and spitfire aircraft.
"They are both exquisite and solemn, and few public facilities have such elegant and urban expressions." British writer and architectural historian Gavin Stamp published in 1989, focusing on common items on the streets of Britain. This is what it says in the book "Telephone Boxes".
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
As a symbol of the UK, the red telephone booth is not static. It has experienced many stories from its birth to its formation in the past hundred years.
The origin of the telephone booth
The development of the communication industry has completely changed people's lives, but such changes have gone through hundreds of years of historical precipitation.
In November 1955, an Indian baby elephant was squeezed into a telephone booth in the UK. John Drysdale
Under the influence of various factors, several private telephone operators gradually withdrew from the British market. By 1892, British Post became the only company to provide telephone services to the UK.
In the following decades, telephones developed rapidly in the UK. The state invests in the establishment of an exchange center to connect different telephone lines and cables. New technologies are constantly being introduced, and telephone cables even cross the English Channel . The UK and the European continent can communicate via telephone.
Due to the high cost of laying telephone cables, popularizing telephones in remote areas has become a new problem. People need to place phones in one place so that they can cover the population of several nearby villages and towns.
© Sadie Ellenor Grace
However, the weather in the UK is always rainy and rainy, and in the era when communication technology is underdeveloped, the signal loss of long-distance phone is very serious, and you often need to yell loudly to hear it. This is very rude to the British people. of. Then going to the "box" to "yell" will not affect family and neighbors.
phone booth was born from this.
Telephone Booth Iteration History
The earliest telephone box in the UK was neither red nor what it is now. It has undergone many versions of evolution.
K1 entered the city, attracting opposition from urban people. The first one to protest was Londoners. Londoners believed that K1 was ugly and destroyed the streets of London, and then Birmingham . Next, even the British Post Office itself was not accustomed to the design of K1.
In the competition, the classical telephone booth designed by British architectural designer Giles Gilbert Scott won the competition, which is the prototype of the British red telephone booth that is most well-known today.
Giles Gilbert Scott 3
Scott is a famous British architectural designer. The Liverpool New Roman Church he designed is considered a model of architectural design that combines modern design and Gothic style.
Giles, who was participating in the telephone booth design campaign at the time, was walking in the cemetery near St Pancras Railway Station in central London. In the cemetery, he saw the grave designed by John Thorne, a designer who once designed the Bank of England building, for his wife. The central dome structure on the tomb was very unique.
K2 Top of the red telephone booth
So, Scott used this as inspiration to design the telephone booth into a round vault. In his design draft for participating in the campaign, he clearly stated that the design was inspired by Thorne Cemetery. Eventually, he won the design campaign.The telephone booth with round vault shape has been used to this day.
Due to the need for aesthetics and real needs, the British Post Office changed the K2 designed by Scott. The main change is the color, changing from silver to eye-catching red, which not only increases the recognition, but also improves the entire city. colorful richness.
Maybe even the Postal Service did not expect that such a change would be so successful, and now it has become an irreplaceable scene in London.
Since 1926, K2 has been installed in batches in London, and the problems have gradually been exposed in practice, which has also led to the continuous evolution and upgrading of the K series. In order to solve the cost pressure, in 1928, the Postal Service commissioned Scott to design a more economical K3. Later, in order to deal with the cement prefabricated board crack problem, the Postal Service designed K4 and K5 one after another.
K4 mimics the appearance of K2, but it is more than twice the size of K2. The K4 is called the "Red Giant" by dissatisfied pedestrians and motorists because of its excessive size. Although it is equipped with a stamp machine, the stamp machine often cannot stick stamps because the K4 outer panel is not weatherproof and often makes annoying noises during calls.
K5 is a style that stops in the model phone booth, and now there is no column left, so people can only restore it by the old photos and work drawings left behind.
@Lizzie Hubbard Photographed in Algarve, Portugal,
K6 is the most widely promoted telephone booth. By 1960, about 60,000 K6s had been installed in the UK. Although only more than 11,000 K6s were saved, it is still the most common telephone booth today.
In the 1960s, for Britain, which had escaped post-war austerity and economic prosperity, the most important thing was to create a new modern Britain, but the new modern style K7 phone booth stayed at the limit of its easily discolored aluminum material. Model, at the same time, K6 has also been precipitated as a cultural symbol in time, and in the K6 phone booth, David Bowie's fictional image Ziggy Stardust began to appear on the stage of popular culture.
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Album
As the first telephone booth to be widely used outside London, the red of K6 becomes a small detail in the contrast between modern cities and conservative countryside.
Initially, in order to avoid arousing the disgust of rural residents, the General Post Office of the UK painted the telephone booth into a low-key green color. But interestingly, after the red telephone booth later became a national symbol, the telephone booth was secretly painted into a country to match the rural scenery. Classic red.
In the 1980s, Thatcher's neoliberal policy promoted the privatization of the public communications industry. In order to show the change, British Telecom once tried to change the color of the telephone booth to yellow, which caused a wave of public protests for a while, so he could only give up. .
After the privatization of British Telecom in the 1980s, new models of telephone booths replaced old-style telephone booths, which were sometimes still red like these telephone booths in south London, Andrew Testa
Reshaping around the community and art Telephone booths
With the ICT With development, the elimination of telephone booths has become inevitable, but after more than 80 years of updates and iterations, the red telephone booth has become an iconic symbol of British style, carrying the pride and nostalgia of the British. The demolition and retention of
phone booth has become an urgent problem that British society needs to solve.
Telephone booth waiting for repair in Red Mountains in south London, Andrew Testa
When the telephone booth becomes increasingly worn and gradually changes from the most attention-grabbing focus of the community in the past to useless trash bins, BT (British Telecom) decided to launch in 2009 " Telephone booth adoption scheme, selling telephone booths to local councils, charities and communities for one pound. Within a few years, many telephone booths that have been eliminated have been reshaped into community mini libraries and defibrillators for first aid.
a telephone booth in south London, with a community library inside, Andrew Testa
a telephone booth in Slaughter in western England, the renovation was put into a defibrillator, Andrew Testa
most mobile phone repairs, including repairing cracked screens, can be found in London This small workshop is completed, Andrew Testa
According to statistics from the UK Communications Authority, in the year ended May 2020, the British made about 5 million calls through public telephone booths, of which nearly 150,000 were called to emergency services and 25,000 were called to Children's hotline, 20,000 times were called to the Samaritans, a suicide prevention agency.
Artists also discovered the value of artistic practice in this small public space. The moment he learned about the "Telephone Booth Adoption Program", artist Lada Wilson immediately knew what he was going to do: "Oh my God, I want to turn it into a gallery!"
It has its own significance as a mini gallery, and the telephone box symbolizes the telephone box. The telephone booth itself was once the link between the community and the physical carrier of shared memory. For a community, the world's smallest art gallery functions as Lada Wilson said: Art can explain communication because it is the original purpose of the phone booth. "
Lada Wilson and her art gallery phone booth
The same as the art gallery, retired teacher Val Meyer Hall transformed the abandoned telephone booth into a "color recuperation" room. "Every day you see or hear a car whizzing and stopping outside the telephone booth, and the driver rushed out to take pictures," she said.
"Color Rehabilitation" telephone booth serves as a new rural center, providing everyone with a space to retreat and buffer. The glass is painted with mushrooms, bees, and carp that make people feel soothing in rural life. The adjustable stool placed on the floor allows the tired people to adjust their comfortable position, shrouded in the sunlight similar to the church stained glass . In the small telephone booth, people can relax their tired nerves.
"Color Rehabilitation" Room Telephone Booth
The British themselves also admit that no one in other countries is as enthusiastic about their country's telephone booths as they do, especially when the telephone booths never bring actual profits, this love seems more stubborn.
This may be because the red telephone booth has become a memory itself. The smell of smoke in the telephone booth, the slightly damp floor, the torn telephone book next to the microphone, the crisp sound of coins falling into the coin slot, no one answered, can only press B The touch of the key when returning the coin...
transformed into a red telephone booth in a street cafe ©Bloomberg
The rain scene I saw when I was trapped in a red telephone booth on a stormy day, and when I was talking on the phone, I saw someone outside the telephone booth The urgency and pressure felt when waiting for the next call were all attached to the small space of the telephone booth.
Art installation in Kingston-on-Thames, England, Andrew Testa
No matter how time passes, how dim the red paint on the phone booth is, as long as they exist, the memories attached to the red phone booth will remain.
Reference article:
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/out-and-about/creative-uses-for-red-telephone-boxes-164288
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/ 29/ring-ask-milky-bar-kid-your-memories-stories-red-phone-boxes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_telephone_box
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yvj5zk/what-happens-when-you-call-a-london-phonebox
https://www.pandainuk. com/article/dianhuating20210326
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