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.’
Denne historien er fra August 23, 2017-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 23, 2017-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Happiness in small things
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Colour vision
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'Without fever there is no creation'
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The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
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Lights, camera, action!
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Bravery bevond belief
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Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds