Have mobiles killed the public phone?

Although many Britons have taken to mobile telephony with gusto in the past few years, there is still a deep national affection for the call boxes many of us have shunned.

Like warm beer, thatched roofs and sweets sold loose from the jar, many Britons believe phone boxes should be retained - but that somebody else can foot the bill.

Admittedly modern phone boxes aren't much to get excited about. The wipe-clean, vandal resistant KX100 of 1985 is most notable for sharing its name with a Kawasaki motorbike and a popular line in amplifiers.

Box of delight

The domed KX Plus, which followed in 1996, doesn't even have that boast and was derided as "illiterate" and "visually incoherent" by Lord St John of Fawsley, chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission (RFAC) - a body which had a hand in the British phone box's golden era.

Our attachment to the public phone is in fact largely based on a lingering nostalgia for the cast iron kiosks designed in the 1920s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott - the architect later responsible for the Tate Modern's Bankside powerstation.

Publics on parade

Gilbert Scott's winning design in the RFAC's competition - the K2 - drew heavily from the nation's neo-classical architectural heritage.

Built like a dreadnought, the old kiosks also embodied a certain muscularity and permanence somehow lacking in many other aspects of the modern built environment.

(Though admittedly, the heavy doors could sever the finger tips of the unwary as surely as any guillotine, and the raised concrete floor all but excluded wheelchair users.)

That the K2 and later K6 (the so-called Jubilee box unveiled in 1936 to coincide with King George V's 25th year on the throne) are of architectural merit is only part of their appeal.

Thin red line

Originally erected by the General Post Office (GPO) these phone kiosks became such a potent part of British street life because of their "letter box red" paint jobs.

Decades before people began harping on about branding, the K-series managed to merge two powerful British brands in the service of the new fangled technology. The paint was the same red as British Army tunics and above the door - in bold relief - was the Monarch's crown.

The pomp of public phones

But despite all this pomp, the telephone box has always been resolutely democratic.

When James Bond producer Harry Saltzman wanted to come up with an everyman antidote to the suave super spy, he decreed that Michael Caine's Harry Palmer should inhabit a world familiar to British movie audiences.

So twice in 1965's Ipcress File, Caine's cockney secret agent can be seen fighting master criminals not with the help of some snazzy gadget - but a trusty K-series kiosk.

The boxes also captivate British musicians. Oasis carted one around on tour, supposedly in homage to a scene in the Beatle's A Hard Day's Night in which the Fab Four hide in a K-series to escape their adoring fans.

The red, red box of home

David Bowie had himself pictured in a K2 for the back cover of his 1972 Ziggy Stardust album - the Man From Mars accentuating his otherworldliness in so ordinary a location.

Even Tom Jones loves the things, having bought the box at the end of his road from which he called his girlfriends, and shipped it to his LA home.

"I don't want no mobile phone, neither?"

When he sold the house to actor Nicolas Cage, Jones feared the box - set in concrete by the pool - would be lost in renovation work. Cage later dug up the Welsh kiosk and made Jones a Christmas present of it.

The march of time and privatisation may have seen many other of the beloved, though smelly, K2s and K6s swept away (only 16,000 survive amid the nation's 141,000 call boxes), but even the plastic replacements have something to commend them.

An estimated 45% of calls made to the children's charity Childline are made in public telephone boxes.