Ringing The Changes

Distinctly British, but rendered obselete by the march of the mobile, the red telephone box is finding new purpose, as Rob Crossan discovers.

- Sarah Farnsworth

When George Orwell wrote his essay The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, he may well have been leaning against something red, stout and, at that time, seemingly permanent as he eulogised about the quintessence of England being made of winding roads, solid breakfasts, green fields and ‘old maids biking to holy Communion through the morning mists’.

Images of this bygone era, mythological or not, usually had one small structure at the margins of the frame. The Giles Gilbert Scott-designed red telephone box was, at the time of Orwell’s essay, fast becoming a de facto facility for every village in Britain. The peak, some five decades later, was reached with a total of 132,000 boxes across the UK. We all know what happened next. The advance of the mobile phone and the internet made this most venerable of creations all but redundant. The result is that, across the country, there are myriad phone boxes left unused and vandalised, with many on the cusp of being uprooted by BT. however, there’s only one phone box that’s become a stained-glass ‘colour therapy’ room. ‘It was a huge undertaking,’ recalls Val Meyer hall, a retired teacher and textiles artist, who, with her husband, Laurence, has lived in the Suffolk village of Mellis for the past 10 years. ‘neither myself nor many other people in the village knew the first thing about how to make stained glass.’

The village telephone box, lying dormant and unused back in 2011, was picked by the community to be the centre point for a village festival the following year. ‘There was an artist living in the village called hilary Beal, who has since moved to South Africa,’ explains Mrs Meyer hall. ‘She had a small studio in the village and, over the course of a few months, a few dozen of us created stained-glass windows for each panel of the phone box reflecting life on our local common.’