historyThe Public Domain Review1816 · London
London's red telephone box was modelled on a domed tomb designed by architect Sir John Soane in 1816
Sir John Soane designed a Portland stone mausoleum in 1816 for his wife Eliza, who had died the year before, in the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church in London. Its central domed structure is a column-like form capped with a dome, styled as a classical ruin. Decades later, Giles Gilbert Scott entered a competition to design a public telephone kiosk and took inspiration from that tomb. His design, the K2 of 1926, evolved into the K6 of 1935, and the dome-and-column shape stayed the same. Soane himself was later buried in the tomb he had designed.
Scott's kiosk design took a classical structure of a column with a dome and shaped it into a functional, mass-produced box, keeping the proportions of the tomb while adding a window and a door.
The red telephone box, now a London icon, carries a funerary monument's form, showing how architectural ideas travel into everyday objects. Its survival today as a protected heritage object shows how such utilitarian design became part of the city's identity.
The red telephone box has been preserved by English Heritage as a heritage object.
Image: The Public Domain Review
