English Buildings

  Help at hand This AA box has appeared by the roadside a few miles from where I live. They’re a dying breed, these AA boxes, and seeing one...

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 M...

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...

Reuse it! In the list of things that need to be done but which are better put off till tomorrow, book-weeding is near the top. When bookpile...

Red face, red box I want to reprise a post I did about nine years ago, because it provides some context for another post I intend to write s...

Flexible friends I’ve done several posts in the past featuring new uses for redundant red telephone boxes. An art gallery in a creative dial...

Noticed in rural Herefordshire In a casual way, I’ve pointed over the years to the various ways people have repurposed red telephone boxes a...

On the look-out How many people miss this as they walk across London’s most famous square? It has been called ‘London’s smallest police st...

Plain, simple, and solid Before I leave the subject of telephone boxes, a recent visit to the excellent Avoncroft outdoor museum in Wo...

The red box ten years on I can hardly believe that it was ten years ago that I blogged about the Gallery on the Green in Settle, Yorksh...

At a slight angle to the universe In Temple Place the other day* I was charmed to see this – a 1920s K2 telephone kiosk, designed by Gile...

Base station I’ve meant for a while to take a photograph of one of London’s few surviving police boxes – those blue kiosks from which p...

Red face, red box Having coffee in Notting Hill Gate before calling my son to arrange our visit to the Ai Weiwei exhibition, I take out...

Spooks, revisited: A question of attribution A brief addendum to an earlier post. Regular readers might be interested to know that th...

‘Peekaboo, peekaboo, here’s looking at you’ Long ago, in an era shrouded by those notorious meteorological phenomena the mists of time,...

What goes round… Once upon a time we all sent lots of letters. Often we'd run out of postage stamps and the Post Office and shops w...

Knocks and scrapes Before we leave behind the subject of the red telephone box – admirably preserved and given a new use by the Henry M...

Red Cube There were plenty of telephones in Hoglands, the Hertfordshire house of the sculptor Henry Moore. They were symbolic, perhaps, o...

Brotherhood of the road AA telephone boxes were scrapped in 2002, but a few still stand as a reminder of the hundreds of black and yellow bo...

Soane box Round the back of the refurbished and extended St Pancras station lies a secluded garden made up of the Old St Giles' burial g...