Distinctly British, but rendered obselete by the march of the mobile, the red telephone box is finding new purpose, as Rob Crossan discovers.
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.’
この記事は Country Life UK の August 23, 2017 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Country Life UK の August 23, 2017 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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