Earl's Court, London

Time machine

Why can you never find a policeman when you want one? It was in part to provide a solution to this old question that London’s Metropolitan Police Force began to adopt ‘police boxes’ in the late-1920s. Police boxes contained a public telephone (accessible from outside the box via a small door), as well as a large door to admit a police officer and to give them access to a chair, a small table, writing equipment, an electric heater, and other bits of kit. Such boxes enabled an officer to contact his local police station to summon help. A flashing light on top of the box acted as a signal to a passing officer to contact his local station. These lines of communication were invaluable in the era before personal radios (let along mobile phones), when the only other way an officer could try to get help was to blow a whistle.

The design of the box used in London was the work of Gilbert Mackenzie Trench, surveyor to the Metropolitan force. These chunky boxes, taller and larger than standard telephone boxes and made of concrete with wooden doors,* became quickly familiar, although they were not the first of their kind. The idea of a police box was first taken up in Glasgow, where tall hexagonal boxes, painted red, were used from 1891 onwards. They became ubiquitous on the capital’s streets (and in some towns outside London), until the use of personal radios became the norm in the 1960s and 1970s. The boxes had slipped from my consciousness until the other week, walking around the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea with a friend, I was surprised to find this one outside Earls Court underground station.

Because of the use of such a box as the portal to a time machine in the British TV programme Dr Who, the design is still well known, so I wasn’t entirely amazed that at least the occasional box has been preserved to pay tribute to television history as well as to the history of policing and design. However, the Earl’s Court box is actually a reproduction – according to online sources it dates to 1996. I was nevertheless still pleased to have my memory jogged. Objects that remind us of past times are time machines in their own way, taking us back…but also bringing us forward to a time when communications are easier, when they work.†

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* The original design specified a wooden structure with a concrete roof, but concrete walls were adopted for durability.

† For my musings on a mobile phone dysfunction, see this blog post.

Beverley, East Yorkshire

Independent

When my mother was a young girl, she thought all telephone boxes were cream in colour. This is because she spent her first years in the city of Hull and did not travel far beyond its boundaries, except to nearby villages and the market town of Beverley, just a few miles away. When World War II began and the then great port of Hull was subject to regular bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, my grandfather found another job and my Mum and her parents moved across the River Humber to the comparative safety of rural Lincolnshire – where the phone boxes, to her surprise, were red. ‘But they’re all red,’ said my grandmother. ‘Except for the ones in and around Hull.’

The reason for this anomaly lies in the history of British telecommunications. In the early decades of the telephone in Britain, lines and exchanges were operated by various local and national companies; some 13 town and city councils also owned their own local telephone systems. By the early-20th century, all these local-authority systems had been sold either to the National Telephone Company or the Post Office – with the exception of the one operating in Hull. So when, eventually, the Post Office took over the whole nation’s telephone system, Hull remained independent and when the Post Office adopted the standard red colour for their telephone kiosks (to match their post boxes), Hull’s retained their own shade of cream.

To those unfamiliar with this particular part of East Yorkshire, Hull’s cream phone boxes come as a surprise. As more and more boxes are removed because, now that almost everyone has a mobile phone, they are not much used, these rare cream boxes become even scarcer than they originally were. And there’s less chance for people to notice other different details – the use of a different, sans serif, letterform for the word ‘TELEPHONE”, for example, and the lack of a crown (symbolic of the Post Office) above this lettering. However, a number of cream boxes are now listed, preventing this rare breed from becoming completely extinct, so that we continue to be reminded of this particular bit of Yorkshire independence.

Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

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* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.