‘Weird Fact Wednesday: from tomb to telephone box’

     
At the meeting of Quatuor Coronati Lodge 2076 last month, Bro. James Campbell presented his paper “Sir John Soane and Freemasonry: A Reassessment Based on a Return to the Original Sources.” That’s not the weird part. Actually, this had been scheduled for last fall, but it didn’t work out. And that’s not the weird thing either. No, this week’s Weird Fact Wednesday concerns John Soane and the design of the now disappearing red telephone boxes of the United Kingdom.

Courtesy Internet Lodge 9659

This portrait of Bro. Soane, by John Jackson, hangs

in Soane’s home, now museum, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Soane died in 1837, and what is weird is he inadvertently inspired the telephone box, which didn’t begin appearing until the 1920s.

I don’t know the contents of Bro. Campbell’s paper, but hopefully it doesn’t contradict what is known about Freemason Soane: He received the degrees of Freemasonry in 1813, and was named Grand Superintendent of Works of the Freemasons that same year. In 1826, he began designing Freemason’s Hall on Great Queen Street (the predecessor of the building we know today), and began its construction in 1828. I cannot confirm his lodge affiliation.

Soane’s wife Eliza predeceased him in 1815; he is said never to have transcended his grief. The architect of the Bank of England, various churches, and other famed structures, also built his wife’s tomb. It is this project, which later would serve as the Soane family tomb, that would inspire the design of the phone boxes.

The main tomb structure:

Courtesy Astoft

There have been different models, but here is a typical telephone box:

Courtesy liberaldictionary.com

The red telephone box has been rendered redundant by the ubiquity of cell phones, so they are disappearing from the streets of the United Kingdom, but in their day they were found everywhere from Manchester to Malta, from Brighton to Bermuda, from Great Queen Street to Gibraltar—you get the idea. Six months ago, The Guardian mentioned there still were 10,000 in existence, with some being repurposed as tiny public libraries, houses for defibrillators, and other uses. There is the adopt-a-kiosk system that saves many of them.

The red telephone box originally was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Battersea Power Station, the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, and other notable sites. The influence of Soane’s tomb on Scott’s phone box is not obvious, in my opinion, but architecture historians attribute the former to the latter, so I side with them. Also, Scott was a trustee of the Soane Museum.

Originally, I was hoping to connect the Soane tomb to the TARDIS by way of the English police box, but maybe more research is needed to illustrate art imitating art.