This K6 phone box is one of only three
remaining in Stoke-on-Trent (the others are in Jack Haye Lane, Lightoaks
and in Hanchurch)
- in June 2008 the one in Bemersley Road was threatened with removal as it is very little used.
The red K6 telephone kiosk is clearly a
classic of good everyday design,
the result of a competition in 1924 to
design a kiosk that would be acceptable to the London Metropolitan
Boroughs.
A tourist attraction
in its own right, it has been a familiar part of the British
streetscape since it first appeared in 1936. Designed the previous
year by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), architect of Liverpool's
Anglican Cathedral, Waterloo Bridge and Battersea Power Station, the
beautifully proportioned K6 is a classically inspired work of
architecture in miniature. It even boasts a "pendentive" dome, a happy
design reference to the work of Britain's most inventive classical
architect, Sir John Soane.
A development of Scott's earlier, and
grander, K2 box of 1924, the mass-produced K6 was designed and built to
last. Each of the 70,000 kiosks put up on British streets between 1936
and 1968 is made up of three-quarters of a tonne of cast iron, teak (the
door frame) and steel (the 200 screws that hold the whole thing
together).
Upon the privatisation
of Post Office Telephone's successor, British Telecom (BT), the KX100, a
more utilitarian design, began to replace most of the existing boxes.
Threatened with complete
destruction by a churlishly "modernising" British Telecom in the 1980s,
the K6 was the object of a high profile and hugely popular conservation
campaign. This resulted in the Grade 2 listing of around 2,000 K6s in
special locations
and several thousand others were left on low-revenue, mostly rural
sites. Many boxes were sold off.
photos: Steve Birks June 2008
Phone box threatened
with removal - near Tongue Lane along Bemersley Road
K6 telephone box
at Jack Haye Lane, Lightoaks,
rescued from redundancy and removal in November 2006
It has recently been repaired and repainted
photos: © Cllr Peter
Kent-Baguley
K6 telephone box
at
Ridding Bank
Hanchurch, just inside the city boundary
photo: © Fred Hughes
