Loughborough's K6 telephone kiosk

Brief history of the telephone kiosk

There were several versions of the telephone kiosk created, ranging from the K1 released in 1912, through to the K8 created in 1968, to the KX100, the last to be designed in the 1980s.

The Grade II listed telephone kiosk at Loughborough railway station is of the K6 variety, and was made by the Carron Company of Stirlingshire, who were also responsible for many of the letter boxes that can still be found around the country [1].

Initially, telephone kiosks weren’t standardised, and early ones were sometimes made of wood, and looked like garden sheds! A company called the National Telephone Company (NTC) began the process of trying to standardise the kiosk design, and they created three models: the Birmingham, the Norwich, and the Wilson. Then, around 1912 the General Post Office (GPO) took over from the NTC and successfully standardised the kiosks, and began the numbering of the designs, starting with the K1, which started to appear around 1920. However, this K1 design, which had three concrete panels and a wooden door, a pyramid roof, sometimes thatched, is probably very unlike the ubiquitous red telephone kiosks like ours at Loughborough railway station.

For some reason, the K1 design wasn’t very popular and so in 1924, the GPO held a competition for a new design. The competition was won by Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott who was responsible for Victorian renovations to many churches. The competition winner was knighted that same year after the consecration service at the new Liverpool Cathedral which he had designed, but which wasn’t completed until 1980. The new K2 kiosk was made of cast iron with a wooden door, had a domed roof and was painted red! However, the kiosk was large and expensive, and really only took off in London, so Giles Gilbert Scott then designed the K3, introduced in 1929.

The K3 was smaller than the K2 and was made from concrete. It was painted in cream, with the metal frames of the glass panels – of which there were 6 rows of three equal sized ones in each of the three glazed sides – highlighted in red. However, the K3 design only lasted for about six years, until about 1935, as the box tended to be rather brittle.

The K4 telephone kiosk, was designed by the Engineering Department of the General Post Office, and its production overlapped with that of the K3. Essentially, the kiosk followed the design of Gilbert Scott’s K2, but was constructed from cast iron, and had a stamp dispensing machine as its rear ‘wall’, so it was very large, and had to be placed so access could be gained from all four sides. The kiosk was painted entirely red, and had six rows of three panes of equal sized glass panes. However, the K4 was not hugely successful, partly due to the noise of the stamp machine which interfered with telephone conversations, the stamp machine not being waterproof, and the kiosk generally being overly large – and nicknamed the ‘Vermillion Giant’ – and only about 50 were ever produced.

The K5 can hardly be said to have been any more successful than the K4, and in fact, it never actually reached full-scale production. Had it gone into full production, the kiosk would probably be made from concrete, however, the design only ever reached the metal-faced plywood stage. In a design change from the earlier kiosks, the K5 was not fully glazed on the three normally glass sides, but had a window of two rows by two columns, rather like a house window.

Our K6 telephone kiosk

And so we come to the K6 kiosk, which is the design outside the Midland Mainline station at Loughborough. Although it looks perfectly normal, it does strike me as being a little odd because I would have expected the door to be on the front so when opened the dail and handset etc. are straight in front of you, but strangely, the door is actually on one of the sides, so you have to sidle up to the wall to get in! (see pic below). And I've just discovered why this is! In 1939, the K6 design was modified, resulting in a Mark 2 with several new versions:

Mk2 - K6A - the door is fitted opposite the back panel and is hinged, and therefore opens, to the left

Mk2 - K6B - the door is fitted opposite the back panel and is hinged, and therefore opens, to the right

Mk2 - K6C - the door is fitted as the lefthand side panel and is hinged, and therefore opens, to the left

Mk2 - K6D - the door is fitted as the righthand side panel and is hinged, and therefore opens, to the right

Interestingly, this kiosk is still in use as a telephone, but its original rotary handset and coin buttons (A for money in, B for returned coins) have been replaced. You can just about see the number punchpad through the glass on the first picture below:

What the inside would have originally looked like

There were originally detailed instructions on how to use the telephone, as well as a list of all the dialling codes, mounted inside the kiosk.

Instructions for use!

The K6 is really the one which came to be the iconic ‘red telephone box’ that we know today. It was designed in 1935, in celebration of the silver jubilee of King George V, who had come to the throne in 1911. The K6 was another box designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who had designed the earlier boxes. The K6 was commissioned by the General Post Office, and 8,000 jubilee boxes came to our streets in jubilee year, 1936, sited in the towns and villages that actually had a Post Office.

These K6 boxes were mounted on a concrete base, and were rectangular in shape, being made of cast-iron sections (except for the door which is actually made from teak) that are bolted together. Each piece of the kiosk is numbered, perhaps to ensure that each piece was attached during construction to the right piece!

Three of the four sides of the box are glazed, with 8 rows of glass on each side, and each side having a larger glass panel sandwiched between two small panels. The box has a domed roof and a teak door, which has a metal cup-shaped handle.

A foundry plate, showing the name of the company that made the box – in our case, the Carron Company of Stirlingshire - can be found on the back of the box, towards the bottom.

The front pediment, above the door, bears a moulded St Edward’s crown. Since the K6 was produced until 1968, and as Queen Elizabeth favoured the use of the St Edward’s Crown over the Tudor Crown, kiosks produced since 1953 bear the St Edward’s Crown. This helps us to date the railway station K6 kiosk as having been produced between 1953 and 1968.

1937 was the 300th anniversary of the Post Office, and in celebration of this another 1,000 K6 boxes were installed over a period of 12 years, provided that the local authority paid a subscription of £4 over a 5-year period. Sadly, the original K6 was prone to being damaged, so a Mark II was developed and introduced in 1939, a design which was slightly more damage resistant.

Having said that the red K6 is iconic and familiar, in 1949, some rural boxes were painted in different colours, and some later ones in green and battleship grey. Over time, the K6 began to look dated, and production stopped, by which time - 1968 - around 60,000 boxes of the K6 design had been installed.

The moulded crown on the domed roof of the kiosk was originally painted in red, but since the early 1990s, in recognition of the heritage value of the iconic red telephone kiosk, British Telecom have highlighted the crown in gold paint. Ours is still red, however (see pic above).

In the late 1950s, the General Post Office began to consider a new design for the telephone kiosk, and initially chose a design for the new K7 by Nevill Conder, which was a square affair, intended to be constructed from aluminium and glass. However, the K7 never entered full-production, and only about a dozen prototypes were produced. This was mostly because aluminium became discoloured and stained in the British climate, making the K7 quite unsuitable.  Enter the K8 …

The K8 was designed by Bruce Martin, but rather than using aluminium as he suggested, the K8 was constructed of cast-iron sections which were bolted together, and mounted on a concrete base that was slightly narrower than the kiosk itself. The kiosk was three-quarter glazed on three sides, is rectangular in shape, and is painted red. In all, around 11,000 K8 kiosks were installed across the country.

When British Telecom took over the public telephone network from the General Post Office in 1985, a new kiosk, the KX100, was introduced. Its frame was made from aluminium, which was clad with stainless steel panels, the back panel which reached the ground, being made from stainless steel, and the other three sides, which didn’t quite reach the ground, and provided ventilation, were made of glass, and included a ‘modesty panel’.  Further variations of the KX100 – the KX100+ - having a domed roof, appeared between around 1996, which offered the customer the option of either paying for their call using cash or card, and also offering access to the internet. By 1999, there were just under 150,000 KX100 and its variants in existence.

Today, as people move to using mobile telephones, thus reducing the need to have a public telephone kiosk on every street, many of these public telephone kiosks have been, and are being converted. Popular conversions include use as a housing for defibrillator equipment, small libraries or book exchanges, tourist information kiosks, museums, or even small coffee vending machines!

A K6 in use as a tiny library near Carn Brea, Cornwall [2]

A K6 with a gold crown, in use as a defibrillator in Melton

News of a Leicester hero being celebrated in a tiny K6 museum in Hereford!

And here are some KX100s in Loughborough - the one on Cattle Market and those outside the Sparrow Hill post office.

More about the architect

Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960) grew up on a farm in Sussex, and attended a Jesuit school in Windsor.  Giles was the son of architect George Gilbert Scott (jnr.), and grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott the Victorian architect mostly remembered for his renovation of churches. The latter was involved in the re-ordering and renovation of our own parish church, and along with W. Bonython Moffatt, also designed Loughborough’s Union Workhouse on Regent Street.

Giles’ mother was keen that he also followed the family tradition and encouraged him into the world of architecture. He was articled to the architectural firm of Temple Moore, and at the age of only 22 he won the competition to design the new cathedral at Liverpool. As Giles was a Roman Catholic, the competition committee assigned a joint architect, G. F. Bodley, but Bodley died 4 years into the build, and Giles was able to modify the original design. Liverpool Cathedral was not completed until 1980, so Giles didn’t get to see the completion of is design.

Giles was knighted in 1924, and was President of the Royal Institution of British Architecture (RIBA) for a time. Some of his other designs include religious buildings, like the Catholic Cathedral in Oban; the chapel at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, and the church for Ampleforth College. While his secular buildings include Chester House in Clarendon Place, London; Waterloo Bridge; the library for Clare College, Cambridge; the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Battersea Power Station, which, rather like the red telephone box, is an iconic structure!

It is interesting to note that the website maintained by the Gilbert Scott family has as its logo, a red telephone box!

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Notes

[1] I wrote a series of posts about those iconic letter boxes in October and November 2022. Here's the list:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

The case of the Burton Street box

Unusual and unreal letter boxes!

[2] Another connection with Loughborough is that the manufacturer, John Heathcoat, who took his lacemaking business to Tiverton in Devon after the Luddite riots, opened another factory in 1934, this time in Carn Brea - see picture below.

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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