My Favourite Photo

This is my favourite photo of all I have taken (so far).

The red is so striking standing out against the background. Yes, I had played with the settings on the camera before taking it, having the red only filter set. It works so well when you are trying to pick out red items. The blue is OK, but the yellow and green aren’t very good.

Or it might just be my ability to work the camera. I’m snap happy, but very little thought usually goes into the content of the photo. I’m very much a quantity over quality merchant where photographs are concerned. Even back in the day before digital when you had to be careful of the number of pictures you were taking, I was atrocious at taking pictures. Blurred photos, heads cut off, fat fingers in the edge of the shot. I was guilty of all of them and half a film would go that way.

But I’m trying to get better. To be more composed. To compose the shot. To think about what I am doing. And in this shot I got a result I was very happy with.

I love those prints you can get. The ones you see in gift shops and homeware places. Where you have the single colour sticking out from the black and white background. A lot of them are London based, and they feature the London buses, post boxes, telephone boxes, the taxi with its light on etc. And so, I’ve been trying for one of my own.

Here in Crawley there aren’t any red buses, so I was looking to settle for the two design classics, the red telephone box, and the red pillar box. You could probably count the number of red phone boxes in Crawley on the fingers of one hand. Pillar boxes are more common.

I think this is the only place in Crawley where I have found the two together. There is the bonus of them being nicely positioned in front of the Victorian church of St. Peter’s in the St Peter’s conservation area in West Green, Crawley.

The red pillar boxes have been around in more or less the same design since 1879, when a return to cylindrical boxes followed a period of hexagonal boxes with the so-called Anonymous boxes. Andrew Handyside of Derby was the foundry for them, but they omitted the royal cypher and the words “Post Office” leading to the Anonymous sobriquet.

The one in the picture is a Type B box, and with the ER on the door it means it was installed at some point during Elizabeth II’s reign, but before 1968 when the design and materials used changed.

And though they look as if they are standing on the pavement, they have a pillar underneath the surface that goes to a depth of about four feet, making them difficult to dislodge.

The red telephone boxes have again been around in a similar design since the K2 design was introduced in 1924. Very little changed in the design between then and when the K6 was introduced in 1935, the design was by Giles Gilbert Scott and was designed to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of George V. It was consequently sometimes known as the “Jubilee” kiosk. It went into production in 1936. The K6 was the first red telephone kiosk to be extensively used outside London, and many thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city, replacing most of the existing kiosks and establishing thousands of new sites. In 1935 there had been 19,000 public telephones in the UK: by 1940, thanks to the K6, there were 35,000. This design wasn’t updated until the very boring K8 in 1968.

The one in the picture is a K6, and is likely to have been from a similar period as the pillar box next to it (sometime between 1952 and 1968), though likely to be after 1955 as it has a St Edward’s Crown on it, and not the original Tudor crown. There is no active phone in the box anymore, and it is used to house the parish notices for St Peter’s. It has unfortunately been vandalised and the glass from the broken pane can be seen in front of it.

It is rare for these telephone boxes to be used for telephones anymore. They tend to house defibrillators or mini libraries, or are just empty. Life has moved on with the explosion in mobile phone use. Calls are made on the go and not in the potentially urine smelling enclosed space of the telephone box. Although a lot of verbal communication had given way to messaging.

The pillar boxes still have a decent amount of usage, but again, far below their heyday. E-mail and messaging have taken a big bite out of their use. Privatisation and the rise of couriers has seen another swathe disappear.

They may not be used as much as they were, but I am happy that they survive side by side here, giving me the chance to take this photo.

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