What can be a relic? Ancient buildings, tombs, stone tablets. In the United Kingdom, the telephone booth has also become a cultural relic, and it is a second-level key cultural relic.
As the first country to achieve near-modernization, the United Kingdom retains a large number of industrialized old objects, such as the famous London taxi and telephone booths. Recently, a nearly 100-year-old telephone booth (K2 prototype telephone booth) has become a high-class national treasure in the United Kingdom, and its protection level has been upgraded from Level II (Special Interest) to Grade II* (Particularly Important Building).
K2 prototype phone booth
British Heritage Minister Helen Whately said: "The red phone booth in London is not only a tool for making calls, but also one of the internationally renowned British business cards. I am happy to be able to provide them with protections. ”
Helen added: "In an increasingly information-based world, we have to preserve something to prove the huge role our country plays in the industrial story." "Obviously, the K2 prototype phone booth is evidence of the glory of the Empire that never sets.
Type K1 phone booth
Before the K2 prototype telephone booth, the United Kingdom had put into a K1 telephone booth in 1921, which was a stone box poured with concrete, which looked very ugly, so it was categorically rejected by the City of London and did not put into mass production.
In 1924, the Royal Council of Fine Arts asked the architect Sir Gilles Scott, along with two other architects, to design an improved version of the telephone booth. One of the three architects, widowed in his early years, would visit his deceased wife from time to time in the church cemetery, and over time he was impressed by the dome-shaped tomb in the cemetery, and when designing the new telephone booth, he deliberately referred to the shape of the dome tomb and drew complete inspiration from it.
Eventually, the K2 telephone booth, based on the design of the Domed Tomb, was finalized, and its first prototype product was placed at the Royal Academy, which still stands there today.
In 1925, the design of the K2 telephone booth was widely recognized, and it was also hailed as "the most suitable telephone booth to erect on the busy streets of big cities". However, the original design of the K2 phone booth was made of blue-green steel, and the British Post Office thought the color was too cold, so it decided to paint it red.
The first official K2 product was successfully installed in London in 1926, the year Queen Elizabeth II was born. Over the next decade, more than 1,700 K2s appeared throughout the city, and even though there were only a few people living in the outskirts of London, many K2s were deployed, and there are now more than 200 K2s left in the whole of London.
Nine years after its introduction, in 1935, the K2 was replaced by the more compact and cost-effective K6 model, also led by Scott, the most common red phone booth still in existence today. It is conceivable that in a few years, K6 will become the new British national treasure.
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