This box features fairly prominently in episode four, as it’s right next to the location where the Doctor and his allies are setting a trap for a War Machine.
This was the first Doctor Who serial to set the tone for later UNIT stories, as the Doctor collaborates with the army to defeat the menace of the week. The phone box is a K2, which were (and still are to an extent) commonplace in London.
The Doctor Who Locations entry places this phone box in Cornwall Gardens Walk – which I could have figured out for myself in this instance seeing as the street signs are displayed fairly prominently in the episode!
Here’s the Street View image: 51°49’66.6″N, 0°18’89.6″W. The phone box is gone – there must have been thousands of K2 boxes in London originally as there are still lots in existence even after so many were removed! However, the distinctive garage door on the left is still intact, as is the lamppost behind which the phone box originally stood.
The Doctor in front of the phone box.
A rare sighting of the Doctor in front of a non-police phone box!
Today we’re looking at another classic phone box that appears in ‘The War Machines’ – this time on location and thus a real in-use phone box.
This box appears later on in the serial, in episode four, once the titular War Machines are out on the rampage around London.
War Machine vs. classic red phone box.
As usual, I used Doctor Who Locations to identify the filming location, which was in Charlotte Place, London.
Here’s the most up-to-date Street View image: 51°51’87.4″N, 0°13’58.4″W. The phone box is sadly long gone, but the Duke of York pub is still thriving (or was in 2019 at any rate).
The War Machine tries to attack the phone box!
The restaurant across the street is now the Rathbone Hotel, but the building next to the railings remains fairly unchanged. I love seeing how streets change over time! I just wish that all the classic phone boxes weren’t disappearing in the process…
One last phone box from ‘The War Machines’ next week.
This is the first of three classic phone boxes from the 1966 Doctor Who serial ‘The War Machines’. This was the first serial that was set entirely on contemporary Earth (and in Doctor Who, particularly in the classic series, ‘contemporary Earth’ means ‘contemporary London’). As such, there are lots of scenes shot outdoors on London streets, meaning it was inevitable that we would bump into the odd non-police telephone box along the way.
The first example in the serial, however, was not found on the streets – it appears in studio footage (filmed either at Ealing Studios or Riverside Studios according to Doctor Who Locations) and was thus presumably a prop.
When the characters first emerge from the swinging ‘Inferno’ nightclub, their attention is caught by some strange happenings at the entrance of a nearby warehouse. My attention, meanwhile, was caught by the phone box that appears tucked under the arch next to the warehouse. How very handy for the warehouse employees!
Some very suspicious-looking characters next to this phone box!One of the suspicious-looking men uses the phone box at one point.It’s very efficient use of the space under this arch.
Next week we’ll have a look at one of the ‘real’ phone boxes that features in the location filming for this story.
A new subseries of Phone Box Thursday today. This one could go on (intermittently) for some time!
Everyone knows about the famous police-box-shaped TARDIS in Doctor Who, but – as a frequent visitor to 20th century Britain – the Doctor has often encountered the red type of phone box too. I’ll be taking a look at these instances while I wait to be allowed outside again to track down more extant examples…
We start off with the first example of a classic red phone box in the programme, at the end of the 1965 serial ‘The Chase’, when the Doctor’s companions Ian and Barbara return to their home era (well, give or take a couple of years) and home city of London.
The police box is a regular sight in Doctor Who… but what’s that lurking in the background?
Spending the day doing some celebratory sightseeing, they find a police box (not the TARDIS), which is flanked on one side by a couple of red examples. The first red phone boxes (shown in black and white, but let’s ignore that) seen in Doctor Who!
The filming location, on Bayswater Road (coincidentally just around the corner from where I photographed my last twoLondon phone boxes in November 2019!) was very easy to track down, as the Doctor Who community is a world of wonderfully in-depth geekery and so the useful site Doctor Who Locations is a thing that exists. Someone on there has taken a photo showing that both the police box and phone boxes were removed at some point and replaced with a more modern KX+ phone kiosk, presumably in the late 1990s when that design was in use.
Make sure you click on the little clock dropdown in the top left corner on Street View, because the really interesting thing here is the story of the telegraph pole that you can see in the still from the programme. At the start of the 2010s, it still looked exactly as it did in the mid-1960s. However, over the course of the last decade, it has become gradually overgrown with ivy, to the point that by the time of the most recent image from July 2019, it was so completely disguised that you really have to know it was there in order to identify it among the trees! Given that it’s slap bang in the middle of London, I am absolutely flummoxed as to whether this was a deliberate attempt by the council to hide it, or just nature taking its course (and the council just went with it, due to the pole no longer being in use).
Anyway, this is not Telegraph Pole Thursday, so let’s move on.
I noticed when I was doing my rounds of central Edinburgh to photograph phone boxes in January 2016 that many of the red phone boxes were standing next to police boxes (Edinburgh and Glasgow have both largely maintained their collections of police boxes; the large rectangular police boxes that are particular to Edinburgh are so sizeable that most of them were turned into coffee kiosks in the 2000s, and have seemingly been doing a roaring trade ever since). Here’s an example in the Grassmarket. It seems this setup may have been common in London, too, when police boxes were still standing there.
Next time the Doctor visits Earth: we find a few more London examples. Tune in next week! (Presuming I don’t find another box for the main collection in the meantime.)
An isolated and slightly decrepit, but essential, example – the phone is still intact and reportedly still very much in use due to the bad phone signal on the island!
Here’s another Scottish phone box that Bill sent in earlier this year.
Red phone box, unknown road, Huntly, 3rd October 2020.
No coordinates for this one as I’ve not been able to track it down on Google Street View. It is somewhere in the vicinity of Huntly, Aberdeenshire.
It’s a bit of a bashed-up example and the building beside it appears to be in even more derelict condition. A bit of a forgotten location in general, perhaps!
That’s the last phone box of 2020, and the last of my phone box collection for now! Until I (or readers) find some more, I’ll be looking at phone boxes in film and TV on Thursdays for the foreseeable future.
Interestingly, this box has only recently been painted white. In all the Street View images from 2014 to 2019, you can see that it used to be yellow! Either way, it makes a very nice addition to the garage forecourt.
Back to the regularly-scheduled red phone boxes next week.
Red phone box, Forest Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne, 21st September 2020.
(I won’t post the exact street or GPS coordinates as it looks like private property.)
This box is a K6, and looks pretty dinky next to last week’s K2. There are a lot of vintage postboxes there too, but I’m not in the business of ‘Postbox Monday’ so it was just the phone boxes I photographed!
