History of the Red Phone Box

This icon of British design had many incarnations, one of which greets the RA\s visitors to this day.  This article was taken from The Royal Academy’s Spring 25 members magazine.

The Royal Academy’s Burlington House strands as a bastion of British Tradition. But even before you have stepped into the great cobbled courtyard, and lifted your gaze to that familiar grand façade, you will already have passed a much smaller but even more widely recognised emblem of our culture.  Tucked away under the lofty arched entranceway that leads off Piccadilly stans the wooden prototype of Britain’s iconic red telephone box the creation of Giles Gilbert Scott RA.

 Scott was among the most prominent British architects of the early 20th century, with a legacy that includes Battersea Power Station and Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral.  In 1924 he won a competition to design a replacement for the K1: the drab concrete telephone kiosk which had failed to win public affection – not least in Eastbourne where local authorities had refused to install it unless it was thatched.  

 Scott never acknowledged any sources for what was to become his legendary K2.  But as he was appointed a trustee of the Si John Soane’s Museum around the same time as he was given this commission, it is likely that it was Soane, a Neoclassical architect and a fellow Academician from an earlier century, who inspired Scott to give the telephone box its classical makeover.

  The funerary moment which Soane designed and erected in St Pancras Old church yard for his wife Eliza, now a family tomb, is seen as a reference for the distinctive curved roof of Scott’s kiosk.  So too is the domed mausoleum that Soane created at Dulwich Picture gallery, where the paned windows offer views from all four sides.  A Scott drawing of the phone box is now on display at Sir John Soane’s Museum, alongside a drawing of the Saone tomb, in a show about modern echoes of the 18th century architect.

 Scott originally intended his miniature temple to modern telecommunications to be made form steel, with a silver exterior and a blue-green interior.  But the Post Office opted for cast iron, which was cheaper, painted bright red so that it would be more visible.  Only around 200 examples of Scott’s winning design survive. (Most of the red boxes still standing are the K6, also by Scott, which replaced the K2 in 1935.). While its original purpose has long since superseded, the love for this icon of industrial design lives on.  The K2 is recognised worldwide as a bright red emblem of British culture – one that bears equally bright testimony to the talents of two Academicians, Soane and Scott, who once haunted Burlington House. 

Reproduced with kind permission from The Royal Academy, Piccadilly Spring 2025 Magazine