London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, a London story that’s touched down a long way from London.
There’s a little piece of London glowing red in Massachusetts.
Not a London bus. Not a Beefeater. Not a miniature Tower Bridge sitting on somebody’s mantelpiece.
A telephone box.
A proper British red telephone box.
And it belongs to a friend of mine. Tom. Or Tommer, as I call him.
There it stands, thousands of miles from London, beautifully illuminated, looking as though it’s waiting for somebody to step inside, put a coin in the slot and telephone Buckingham Palace.
Or perhaps the local fish-and-chip shop.
It’s a wonderful thing. An English eccentricity transplanted to New England.
And it got me thinking.
About telephone boxes.
About what they meant to us.
About the extraordinary number of conversations that took place inside them.
And about one particular telephone call that changed my life.
But first, that telephone box.
Because the red British telephone kiosk has a surprisingly distinguished pedigree.
For one thing, it’s the work of an architect.
And not just any architect.
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
A man who designed Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea Power Station and Bankside Power Station, the latter now the Tate Modern.
Imagine that for a moment.
A man capable of designing a cathedral, a gigantic power station, a building that would eventually become one of the world’s great art galleries.
And a telephone box.
There’s something wonderfully British about that.
We take a perfectly ordinary piece of street furniture, something whose principal purpose is to keep the rain off somebody making a telephone call, and commission one of the country’s leading architects to design it.
The result?
A masterpiece in miniature.
The most familiar version is the K6.
K for kiosk. Six because it was the sixth design in the series.
It was introduced in 1935 to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George V.
And it became one of the most recognisable objects in the world.
The little red box with its domed roof, its small panes of glass, its illuminated TELEPHONE sign.
A tiny building.
A tiny monument.
A tiny piece of architecture that became a national emblem.
And there’s a lovely architectural connection.
The roof of Scott’s telephone kiosk owes something to a tomb.
Not just any tomb.
The tomb of Sir John Soane.
Soane, one of London’s greatest architects, designed his own family mausoleum in the churchyard of Old St Pancras.
It has a distinctive domed roof.
And Scott’s kiosk design echoes that shape.
Think of it.
A Victorian architect’s tomb influencing the design of a twentieth-century telephone box.
Death and communication.
A mausoleum and a public telephone.
London has a genius for these unlikely connections.
And there’s another Soane connection worth making.
His extraordinary house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
One of London’s great treasures.
A place so packed with paintings, antiquities, architectural fragments and ingenious arrangements of space that it feels as though you’ve wandered into the mind of a genius.
But back to the telephone box.
Why red?
Visibility.
You could spot one from a distance.
A brilliant flash of colour on a grey British street.
And they were substantial things.
Cast iron. Heavy. Solid.
Not something you could casually pick up and move.
Tens of thousands were installed across Britain.
They stood outside railway stations, on village greens, at busy crossroads, in quiet residential streets.
They were everywhere.
Quietly beautiful. Reassuring. Evocative.
America had the golden arches. Britain had the red telephone kiosk.
Easy to imagine one of the more thoughtful of them, back when they were all young K6s, saying to its fellows, with an assist from Margaret Atwood, “In the end, we’ll all become stories.”
And sure enough, one of them has.
Tommer’s telephone box.
All the way over there in Massachusetts.
And here we are, telling its story.
So, yes, everywhere throughout this green and pleasant land.
And then, gradually, they weren’t.
Mobile phones arrived.
The public telephone began its long retreat.
The red boxes became expensive to maintain, increasingly little used, sometimes vandalised.
Many disappeared.
Others survived because people loved them too much to let them go.
Some became miniature libraries.
Some housed defibrillators.
Some became tiny cafés or other ingenious little businesses.
And some travelled overseas.
Which brings us back to Tommer’s telephone box in Massachusetts.
And that word. Kiosk.
It’s a traveller too.
It came into English through French, from Turkish köşk, ultimately from Persian kūshk.
Originally it meant a pavilion, often an open-sided garden structure.
Something rather elegant.
Something you might find in the grounds of a palace.
Not a little cast-iron box on a wet pavement in London.
Over time, the meaning changed.
A kiosk became a small freestanding structure used for selling newspapers, refreshments, tickets or other services.
And eventually for making telephone calls.
So that little red telephone box in Massachusetts carries quite a history.
Persian gardens.
Turkish pavilions.
French vocabulary.
British architecture.
And an American owner.
Quite a journey for one small building.
But what interests me most about telephone boxes isn’t the architecture.
Or the etymology.
Or even the extraordinary fact that a design inspired by a tomb became one of the most familiar objects in Britain.
It’s what happened inside them.
Because a telephone box was a little private room in a public place.
You stepped inside.
You closed the door.
And the outside world disappeared.
Or almost disappeared.
You could still see it through those little panes of glass.
People walking past.
Buses rumbling by.
Rain running down the windows.
But you were somewhere else.
Talking to somebody who might be a hundred yards away.
Or a thousand miles away.
Or on the other side of the Atlantic.
And what conversations those little boxes must have heard.
Good news.
Bad news.
Births.
Deaths.
Arguments.
Reconciliations.
The words “I love you.”
The words “It’s over.”
Somebody ringing home to say they’d missed the last train.
Somebody ringing to say they’d got the job.
Somebody ringing to say they hadn’t.
And I wonder how many marriage proposals were made from telephone boxes.
How many people stood in one of those little glass-and-cast-iron rooms, clutching the receiver, heart thumping, waiting for an answer that would change their lives.
I wonder because I know of at least one such proposal.
Mine.
Though there’s a geographical complication.
I wasn’t in London.
I was in Minneapolis.
And the young woman I wanted to marry was in London.
A little English rose.
Several thousand miles away.
So I made the call.
Across the Atlantic.
From a telephone box in Minneapolis to London.
And proposed marriage.
But here’s the really shameful part.
I reversed the charges.
Yes.
I made a collect call.
Which meant the young woman I was proposing to had to agree to pay for the privilege of receiving my proposal.
Cad that I am.
And speaking of that telephone call, Tom and I have nicknames for one another.
I call him Tommer.
He calls me Sir David.
Daft Americans!
One of us sounds as though he belongs in the House of Lords.
The other sounds like a character out of Mark Twain.
And come to think of it, I must be the only knight of the realm who proposed marriage on the wings of a reverse-the-charges telephone call.
Just imagine it.
The most romantic question of my life, preceded by a rather less romantic one.
“Will you accept the charges?”
Romance on the cheap.
Chivalry at the other end of the line.
And the future Lady Tucker footing the bill.
Some knight in shining armour.
More like a cad in a telephone box.
But there’s something else about all this.
Something that perhaps we’ve lost.
A telephone call used to be an event.
Especially a long-distance call.
You had to make arrangements.
Find a telephone.
Have the right coins.
Or persuade somebody to accept the charges.
You had to wait for the connection.
And when the person answered, suddenly the distance between you seemed to disappear.
You had their voice.
Nothing else.
No photographs.
No emojis.
No little blue ticks telling you they’d read your message.
Just a human voice travelling an extraordinary distance.
And sometimes that was enough.
Enough to fall in love.
Enough to change a life.
Enough to cross an ocean.
Which brings me back to Tommer’s telephone box.
That little piece of London glowing red in Massachusetts.
It isn’t simply a handsome old piece of British street furniture.
It’s a reminder.
Of a time when voices mattered in a slightly different way.
When a telephone box could be a refuge.
A confessional.
A place of extraordinary happiness.
Or heartbreak.
And when a young man in Minneapolis could telephone a young woman in London, ask her to marry him, and make her pay for the call.
There are some things a gentleman simply shouldn’t do.
Fortunately, nobody has ever accused me of being a gentleman.
And on that note, this is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Thanks for listening.
And Tommer, if you’re listening, keep that telephone box glowing.
Somewhere in the world, somebody may still be waiting for a call.
See you tomorrow.