There used to be one object in every English village that stood out as a symbol of stable government and a refuge to the traveller: the telephone booth. This cast iron structure in imperial red was designed in 1924 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Like many architects who worked in the Indian summer of the British empire, Scott was eclectic, able to draw on classical, Gothic and proto-modern motifs in order to provide a rich vocabulary of detail, responsive to the new demands of the industrial age. His telephone booth is a case in point. Classical in outline and inspired by Sir John Soane’s tomb for his wife in Saint Pancras churchyard, it is nevertheless an unashamed product of industrialism, with a suggestion of Bauhaus naughtiness in its fenestration. So suitable did this form prove to the streets and villages of England that it would often be seen on Christmas cards, upright in a sea of snow, beside the Gothic spire, the gabled cottage and the five-barred gate. It was a paradigm of what street architecture should be: permanent, dignified, expressing an idea of legitimate order.

With the privatisation of the telephone network, Britain took a giant leap into the future. The first sign of this was the rapid disappearance of Scott’s familiar landmark in favour of a barbarous concoction in alloy and shatterproof glass, of the kind familiar from the streets of New York. The new telephone booth is often open to the elements and to the commotion of the city street. It offers neither shelter nor privacy to its occupant; it is void of style or architectural meaning. It represents not stability and lawful order but movement and unceasing change; it is a visible reminder of the futility of listening for ancestral voices amid the din of the city. You do not enter the New York telephone booth, but reach out to it as you pass. It is not the reassuring symbol of a permanent home, with which you can at any moment make soothing contact. It is a place from which you cry for help into a void from which help can never come.

This contrast illustrates a profound change in our perception of public space. The street is the public place par excellence, where the city impresses its character on those who live in it and vindicates, if it can, the society which it exists to sustain. The design of a city street was never, in the great epochs of civilisation, left to chance. The height, alignment, fenestration, and doorways of city houses were the subject of regulation, and the objects that were placed in the street for the benefit of passers-by confirmed their sense of a common way of life.

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