The London Design Festival, held annually in September, never fails to showcase the best and most innovative new design here in London and the UK. While it’s always exciting to see what’s new and what’s cutting edge, there are certain pieces of design which are so iconic they are as as intertwined into British life as the Queen, tea or joining a queue just because it’s there and it would be rude not to.

Today we’re pondering the telephone box: surely a symbol of classic British design if ever there was one.

It’s easy to forget how many iterations there have been of the humble telephone box since the first incarnation appeared in London in 1920. That was a wooden box, not especially beloved by the Post Office (who originally owned them), and a competition was launched to find a design for a better alternative. The winning entry of that contest was a design by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who, with the Waterloo Bridge and Battersea Power Station to his name, was hardly a one-hit-wonder in the design stakes.

The K2 was too pricey for mass production and although a number of them did appear in the capital, Gilbert Scott was asked to modify the design. (If you’re so inclined, the original prototype is still where it was first placed: tucked neatly away behind the gates at the Royal Academy. Go and sneak a peek.) His second attempt – made from concrete – was prone to cracking, but the essence of the design was very much there. The curved roof – said to be inspired by the Dulwich Picture Gallery – was something that stayed true.

The iconic phone we tend to imagine is the K6, first designed in 1936 and more than 70,000 produced over the course of its lifespan. Vandalism, cleaning problems and – as the ’60s marched on – a tendency for the design world to pursue more modernist lines, were all in part to blame for the cessation of production.

The thing is though, isn’t that little red box with the small glazed panels exactly what you associate with a phone box, even 50 years on?

Like all good iconic pieces of design, the enthusiasm for these structures hasn’t waned and, if anything, there’s more affection for them now people have switched into ‘preservation’ mode. If not exactly ‘better living in small spaces’ (our favourite subject here at The Box Room), there are some wonderful ideas out there for doing more with the space you’re allotted. Here are some of our favourites.

See also…

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• From bedroom to brewery: how home-brewing has become London’s newest hobby
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Pod Works

New York firm Bar Works launched their idea for old phone boxes earlier this year in the UK. Phone boxes, under this scheme, are retrofitted with wi-fi, a printer, a coffee machine and other office essentials, and designed to be a work pod ‘away from the whir of the coffee machine’ (referencing, naturally, the growing breed of freelancers using the city’s coffeehouses as their own office spaces). When you sign up to the scheme (for £25) you’re given a unique access code, which allows you to unlock any of the [vacant] units around London (and beyond). It’s a novel idea, perhaps not for the claustrophobic or the long of limb…

Red Kiosk Company

Brighton-based company Red Kiosk take disused phone boxes and lease them out to small businesses. The idea has been so popular that you are just as likely to stumble upon their phone boxes (with a variety of tenants) anywhere from Edinburgh to Plymouth, as well various locations in London. In Hampstead, you can get your daily coffee from one such phone box. It’s not only an easy ‘shop’ to spot, it is – as shop owner Umar Khalid says – nice to utilize something that “they were going to remove”. Caffeine and conservation? Nice one.

The loo

Yes, yes. We know you’re silently making jokes in your head about phone boxes smelling like toilets, and that’s most assuredly not where we’re going with this one. Except, we kind of are… Meet John Long, from Somerset, who professed to the Telegraph that, “I’ve wanted a red telephone box for years and I didn’t have an outside lavatory, so I thought I could combine the two.” For many of us the concept of an outside area in and of itself is slightly novel, but to yearn for an outside loo when internal plumbing exists is something we are – to be honest – struggling with.

Gig venue

 

Is the O2 too overwhelming for you? Does the Hammersmith Apollo give you an unnerving sense of agoraphobia? No problem! For a truly intimate gig experience, consider a phone box: you’re right up near the main event, and hecklers are kept to a minimum (unless you are one). Not convinced? It doesn’t sound like the comedian in question was either when the local paper reporting that he “breathed a massive sigh of relief when he learned his next gig in Middlesborough will take place in the revamped 400-capacity Crypt”. No kidding. It seems safe to say that this idea only really works for the purpose it was intended for: a publicity exercise.

Secret cocktail bar

If Roxie Hart were Liverpudlian and in need of a G&T and all that jazz, our next selection might have been just the ticket. The bar, cunningly named Ex-Directory, is hard to find by design, so the entrance is through the doors of a red phone box. OK. Hands up here: it’s not a bonefide phone box, but this is so cool, we just had to include it here. Transgression forgiven?

Phone repair shop

There’s a beautiful symmetry to opening a mobile phone repair shop in a phone box, as Lovefone CEO Rob Kerr did over the summer. If you’re in the Greenwich area and your phone breaks, look out for the world’s tiniest repair shop. It’s opposite the Mitre pub, so you can have a swift half while Rob sorts it out.

*Oh, and Rob found his phone box through The Red Kiosk Company (see above). Isn’t that cool?

The library

No mention of converted phone boxes would be complete without mention of the tiny library, and it’s no surprise to learn that London’s smallest library (in Lewisham) is indeed housed inside a phone box… The phone box was bought for £1 from BT from their ‘Adopt a Box‘ scheme, which encourages communities to find a home and a use for these icons. Other boxes bought via the scheme have gone on to house defibrillators, art galleries and a coffee shop.

We might not have design iconic status just yet, but our lovely blue boxes are as hip as it gets in the self-storage world. As London’s self storage company with a difference, we at Boxman can deliver empty, sturdy boxes to your home, and then return to whisk them away to our secure storage facility (which may or may not be accessed through a phone box – we’re not telling). It’s easy to get your things back too – just book a slot before 3pm the working day prior and Bob’s your uncle. Lovely stuffs.