You would be amazed how much difference the film stock / over under exposure /picture fading makes so it is really hard to tell (the alfi picture looks like particularly bad grading.

No doubt - even the time of day and whether cloudy or sunny can have a profound effect.

Nonetheless, we have plenty of photos with P.C.s next to the darn things at various stages over the years as a calibration. Pretty sure the Met uniform colors were a bit more standardized. There is also the comparison of the top sign color (after 1937) to the Box's as I'm am also fairly sure that color has remained more consistent (though also a little more subject to fading on the sunny side of the box).

There is no doubt really, based on the above calibrations alone, that the "usual" Box's color of 1930 is significantly lighter than that of 1945, which itself is significantly lighter than 1965. There is so much variability, however, I'm beginning to think each Division, Sub-Division or even District were left to themselves to paint their boxes with their own paint supplies based only on general outlines. The Posts showed far more consistency than the Boxes ever did.

Quote...darker and darker over the years...

Quote...There is so much variability, however...

Pointless cocktail party conversation (and very nerdy conversation at that), because there is no way to really test the hypothesis BUT... 

When I was small our priest quietly raised money to have the interior of our church repainted.  I grew up in a small Wisconsin town with a lot of German immigrants so our church interior was actually a fairly plain plaster affair but it had been painted in trompe l'oleil technique to look like some Gothic cathedral--fake stonework, fake mosaics, etc.  But decades of candles and incense had darkened everything significantly.  It was shocking, the difference after he had it all cleaned and repainted. 

I wonder if they didn't use "darker and darker" paint.  I wonder if soot and exhaust and the various pollution so prevalent in the latter half of the 20th century (look at a photo of a freeway during rush hour to see just how much cleaner modern cars are) just darkened the boxes naturally.  If this was the case, the reason some boxes would be lighter than others is because either they were in an area with relatively less pollution and/or they were cleaned and/or repainted more often than the darker boxes. 

Again, it would be hard to prove this without building a couple boxes and replicating pollution conditions, but I think it is at least an interesting theory.  Probably completely wrong, but what the heck. 

Well I remember seeing a real live box when I was about 6 or 7.  We lived in North West London and regularly walked past it to the shops. It was very dark, almost black.

A photo provided by Tim Clayton (trc11) of the Barnet By-Pass Box dating from 1975 --



No, the boy isn't Tim.

Enlarged for detail ---

These, I don't recognise, but I'm usually wrong lol

https://www.flickr.com/photos/40910684@N04/albums/72157658420739804

KB

Well Done Chris an excellent find........Certainly haven't seen these colour shots before!

The credit goes to my son Robert, who found them whilst searching for telephone box on flickr
I'm glad they're unfamiliar

KB

I don't know if it's been mentioned before, but it's interesting how the back of the box doesn't have any blue panes in the bottom row (center) of the windows, while the other three sides have the blue panes.

Dino.

Oh, those are nice. Always good to have more photos of this Box.

Anyone want to contact this flickr member to see if we can post their photos here?

Dino - looking at the picture a bit more closely, it appears that the left hand rear window (as you look at it from the back) does still have it's blue pane, and the right one looks like it may have been replaced by a pebbled pane. Certainly not the first time we've seen a later repair change the usual window pattern for a Mark 3.

The blue panes must have been hard to come by at some point (probably the reason they stopped using them during the War when the Mark 4's first came out) - the pebbled panes did as well after the 1960s when they fell out of common use.

Well, it really is hard to tell what's in that lower left center pane:

Just a snipped of the rear windows (enlarged and sharpened some) - not posting the entire image.

It is difficult to tell what's in that lower left center pane. Is that blue a reflection? (The top center pane looks bluer than the lower one.) The lower one looks more greyish - as though we're seeing part of the box's interior through it, like we are with the top two outer panes (same greyish color to them). The bottom center pane on the right window, though, is clearly (pardon the pun) the pebbled glass.

If only there was a straight-on photo of the box's back, then we would know for sure.

Dino.

Hmmmm...

In reviewing some of the earlier posted photos, there does appear to be a head on shot of the back of the Box --



Looks like both bottom centre panes were actually clear glass at that point. Interesting.

Ooh! I wonder how I missed that one. Still, like you say, hb: interesting. Now I'm going to end up pouring through the photos of the other Met Boxes to see if any of those have nice images of the rear, and how many have rear windows without blue panes in that bottom center. (Or was the Barnet Box the only one like this?)

Dino.

Considering the vintage of these photos, around 45 years after the Box was erected, I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions as to whether it was originally equipped with blue windows in the rear or not based on these pictures. There have been a lot of photos showing Mark 3's with odd window rearrangements in post-war photos, so my suspicion is that these are just replacements for broken panes.

Not a Mark 3, but the Hall Lane Box (J23) was a late model Mark 2 that almost certainly had blue panes in the back, as shown in this photo: http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=3755.msg68647#msg68647. Note that it was installed only a month or two before the Barnet By-Pass Box in mid 1935.

Quite right. I've been looking through the Met Box Catalogue at as many images as my eyes could stand, and it looks like all the images I found showing the rear of boxes shows them with the blue panes in the windows. So it only stands to reason that the Barnet By-pass Box would also have had blue panes in the rear, especially since it went up only a couple of months after the Hall Lane Box. So your suspicions are more than likely right, and those clear panes are - or rather were - replacements for broken ones (with clear glass being less expensive than the blue).

I wonder if there are any records of when those panes were replaced. (More curiosity than anything, but it would give us an idea of how long the Barnet Box had the clear panes before it was taken down.)

Dino.