British streets are full of objects so familiar that most people walk past them without a second glance. The red pillar box at the end of the road. The red phone box that nobody uses anymore. The ornate Victorian lamp post with its scrolled ironwork. Each of these is so embedded in the visual language of British life that they've almost stopped being things you notice. But each has a more interesting story behind it than its mundane presence suggests.
The pillar box: Anthony Trollope's best idea
The pillar box, Britain's iconic red cylindrical post box, was introduced in 1852 and its design was championed by an unlikely figure: Anthony Trollope. Before he became one of the Victorian era's most prolific novelists, Trollope worked as a surveyor for the Post Office, and it was in that role that he advocated for a new kind of roadside letter collection point. His inspiration came from similar boxes he had seen in France, and the result was the first British pillar box, installed in St Helier, Jersey in 1852.
The early pillar boxes were not red. The first ones were green, intended to blend with the landscape, but they blended so well that people couldn't find them, and the distinctive red that we now associate with post boxes was adopted as a standard colour from 1874 onwards. The Victorian pillar box went through several design iterations before the relatively standardised forms we recognise today emerged. The most elegant of the Victorian designs, the Penfold box, named after its designer John W Penfold, has a hexagonal shape and ornate detailing that makes it genuinely beautiful rather than merely functional. A handful of original Penfold boxes still stand in London and a few other locations, and they're striking objects if you know to look for them.
Curious Rabbit makes a laser-cut Penfold Pillar Post Box kit, capturing the distinctive hexagonal design of this Victorian original. It's available as a flatpack kit or ready-made, and makes for a distinctive shelf piece for anyone with an eye for British design history.
The red phone box: Giles Gilbert Scott's competition entry
The K2 telephone kiosk, the classic red phone box, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924 as an entry for a Post Office competition seeking a standardised design for public telephone kiosks. Scott's design won, and though it went through several iterations (the most common version you see today is the K6, designed for the Silver Jubilee of King George V in 1935), the essential form, the red paint, the dome roof, the Georgian glazing pattern, remained consistent.
Scott was also responsible for Battersea Power Station, Liverpool Cathedral, and Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern), which gives you some sense of the range of his ambition. That the same architect who designed those monumental structures also designed the phone box is one of those pleasing coincidences of British cultural history.
The phone box is now a threatened species. BT has removed tens of thousands of kiosks from British streets over the past two decades, and while listed protection covers some of the most significant examples, many have been lost. Those that survive have often been repurposed as book exchanges, defibrillator stations, or art installations, which is a better fate than demolition but not quite the same thing. Curious Rabbit's Telephone Box Lamp kit is a working lamp in the form of a miniature phone box, available as a flatpack kit or ready-made.
Victorian lamp posts: a cast iron legacy
The ornate cast iron lamp post is one of the most overlooked pieces of Victorian design still in everyday use. The characteristic decorative ironwork, the scrolled brackets, the fluted columns, the moulded bases, reflects a period when public infrastructure was expected to be beautiful as well as functional. The Victorians invested in street furniture in a way that no subsequent generation has matched, and the lamp posts that survive from that era are genuinely impressive objects if you stop to look at them.
The transition from gas to electric lighting, and subsequently from electric to LED, has changed the character of lamp posts considerably. But in many British cities and towns, particularly in conservation areas and historic city centres, Victorian cast iron columns survive in service, their upper sections updated with modern lamp heads but their lower sections unchanged for over a century.
Why these objects matter
Street furniture is the furniture of shared life. The lamp post, the phone box, and the pillar box are all objects designed for everyone, paid for from collective funds, and placed in public space for collective use. They're democratic objects in the most literal sense, and their design reflects what each generation thought public space deserved. The Victorian examples, the Penfold box, the K2 phone box, the ornate lamp post, reflect a set of values about public space and public life that it's worth remembering and occasionally arguing for.
Curious Rabbit makes laser-cut wooden gifts and model kits, designed and made in Wales.
