The red telephone box, post box
and London bus are familiar symbols of Britain. The first was designed by Sir
Giles Gilbert Scott (1880- 1960) and here I am at Liverpool Cathedral where he
is buried with his wife.
The K6 Kiosk is my favourite and they’re still to
be seen in streets of the United Kingdom, Malta, Bermuda and Gibraltar. Giles
didn’t just design this though. He was a leading architect and designer known
for his works on the Houses of Parliament (after the Second World War),
Waterloo Bridge, Oxford and Cambridge universities, Battersea Power Station and
Liverpool Cathedral. This latter is where he’s buried - not in a corner in the
cemetery round the back of the cathedral but at the grand entrance.
Though he’s buried in Liverpool he was born in
Hampstead in London, one of six children. Architecture was in the blood as his
dad and granddad were architects, the latter designing the Albert Memorial and
the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station. His dad was declared mad and put
in hospital and Giles later said that he remembered seeing his dad only twice
after that. When he was nine he was given a farm in Sussex by his uncle with
him mum being the legal tenant. They remained in London though and only used
the farm for weekends and holidays. To fire her sons minds she took them on
cycling trips and encouraged them to take an interest in architecture by
sketching buildings. Something must have stuck as Giles would go on to design
scores of buildings from churches to colleges to war memorials to power
stations and even the Guinness brewery.
I won’t bore you will his impressive list of
achievements but you can look him up on the internet. He wasn’t knighted for
nothing.
Giles was in his fifties when he was commissioned
by the Post Office to update the old K2 kiosk (which weighed a ton, was too big
and expensive to be used outside London.) He came up with the K6 which
celebrated the Jubilee of King George V. It was 25% lighter in weight at three
quarters of a ton. By the end of the 1930s there were 20,000 K6 telephone boxes
in use all over the UK. Sadly there only approximately 10,600 remaining and
when I see one I might go and stroke it a bit (only 1500 K2 kiosks remain.)
Giles was still working when he contracted lung
cancer and was taken into University College Hospital in London. He took the design
drawings with him and worked in bed until he died aged 79. Being a staunch
Catholic he was buried by the monks of Ampleforth
College outside the entrance of Liverpool Cathedral, alongside his wife (as a
Roman Catholic he could not be buried inside the body of the Cathedral).
I spent about fifteen minutes near the grave but
not one person entering/exiting the cathedral spared it a glimpse.
Heading up to the cathedral in
Liverpool to see Giles’s grave…