I interrupt my flow of blog posts featuring buildings seen on my travels to turn my attention to something only a few miles from where I live. Nowadays the village of Guiting Power is typical Cotswolds: well kept stone cottages, a couple of pubs, a church with Norman roots, a former Post Office now selling excellent coffee and food. Farmers, the horse racing fraternity, cyclists and locals mingle, mostly amicably. Battered old Land-Rovers vie for parking spaces with polished BMWs. The place looks prosperous.
It was not always so. In the early-20th century, agricultural decline brought poverty, together with dilapidated cottages. Two landowners turned the place around: In the 1930s, Moya Davidson bought up cottages and let them to local people; in 1958 Raymond Cochrane ran the estate and continued to improve the cottages. It was Cochrane who was faced with finding a new use for the old blacksmith’s shop on the green. Part of this building was converted to a bus shelter and next to this a telephone box was installed – not the usual red freestanding kiosk, but a small booth incorporated into the building and fronted by a standard door as used on a K6 telephone box. The familiar door is testimony to the effectiveness and ubiquity of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s phone kiosk design – we know exactly what it was designed for, even though there is no ’Telephone’ sign.
Some years ago, however, the public telephone was removed, being little used in the age of the mobile phone. A new use was found: the village defibrillator was installed there. More recently still the door has been smartened up with new paint. The original colour scheme consisted of a grey frame and red door, a combination that was once used for telephone boxes in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Guiting Power was in the Cotswold AONB, which is now the Cotswolds National Landscape, so this box merited the design with the grey frame. Maybe whoever looks after the box will come back with some grey paint and finish the job.
I hope people near and far will appreciate this small triumph of public service and its unusual design solution – only a handful of telephone boxes are incorporated into existing buildings in this way and this one, with its important new use, deserved to be p[reserved. As a result, the Twentieth Century Society has submitted applications for this building, and four more unusual telephone boxes, to be listed. It’s a good idea to afford them this protection and I hope the listing comes into place.
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