Worcester Park Station Box

[Dalekoracle]

 
Between the shelter in the foreground and the phone box, you can see... The Worcester Park Station Box
This photo was taken in 1951. Original image here:
https://tuckdb.org/postcards/26560

[Dalekoracle]

from the same photoset - taken in 1951...

[Dalekoracle]

Same box, another view...

https://tuckdb.org/pictures/290083

[petewilson]

A great find Mark and a good site (Better than Francis Frith with no Watermarks and full sized "free" Versions!) 

[Dalekoracle]

I don't know how extensive the site is... and its very much a case of typing in placenames (or in some cases streetnames) to see what, if anything, comes up.
Not even scratched the surface yet. The photos above I found in little more than ten minutes. I hope theres a wealth of brand new photos just waiting to be discovered on there.

[petewilson]

Come and join me over at Albert Crescent, Chingford for the one I found on this site.......
The only downside of this site are the dates are less accurate then Francis Frith..But some good quality Photographs at an excellent price (i.e. free!)

Pete

[Dalekoracle]

Free.... thats the magic number!

[hb88banzai]

Yes, free is wonderful!

I've already been through everything in the outer parts of greater London (by "place", which are mostly listed by county - having browsed through Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Hertfordshire, Essex, and even Buckinghamshire and Berkshire just to be sure) and these together with what Pete and I have posted on other Topics today appear to be about it in the outer areas. Have only gone through half of the central London category itself - it's huge, so there might be a few there.

Note that the dates given aren't when they were actually taken, but when they were "first used", which I take to mean when Tuck published them or first listed them in a catalog. When they include postmarked sides they are invariably later than the listed date.

As noted above, in the case of all of these Tuck photos/postcards for Worcester Park the "first used" date given is 28 January 1951.

Oh, but Dalekoracle, you missed one --



There it is lurking behind the pole --



These photos are actually quite significant as they are the earliest relatively hard dated pics we have of this Box. The Frith photos are notorious for putting the circa in circa, sometimes being as much as a decade off. These dates, on the other hand, give an upper limit on dating, with the photos themselves probably being taken no more than a year two before the "first used" dates. I'll explain why these are so exciting below.

I should probably take the liberty of posting the full sized versions of the pics posted by Dalekoracle here, just in case any of the links ever fail us. Just had to compress them a bit more than the originals to get them below the 500k limit (from 95% compression quality to 84-85%).







Blowups of these --

[





Now, to the significance.

Due to the dating we can assume that these photos were actually taken circa 1948 to late 1950. The first two show this Box in late post-war faded and tattered paint and in the last photo it is freshly painted a medium to dark blue with what look to be white phone door and window frames. If the Tuck db site is correct in their dating and all were part of the same release at the beginning of 1951, then this is most interesting.

Even more importantly, all these images are of the same Crich type Mark 4 Metbox as the much later photos we have of it. These are then, as indicated above, the earliest confirmed photos of a Mark 4 that we have to date. Since it had obviously been around for awhile in those faded paint photos, it means that our dating for the Mark 4s, partly circumstantial to this point, is almost certainly correct - circa late 1939 to circa 1952.

Some background: We now have it from a 1930 Met memo from Trench himself that they didn't start installing the first Mark 2 all-concrete boxes until Kingston sub-division was being equipped late 1930 to early 1931, so all of Wimbledon sub-division (commissioned October 1930), including V35 at Worcester Park Station (per a Box list from a Beat Book published in Aug 1930), was originally equipped with timber Mark 1 Metboxes. This particular Box was originally sited across the road on a triangular green opposite the "Railway Inn" (later "The Worcester"). It was still there when the 1935 OS map was prepared, being relocated outside the railway station by the 1955 OS map. Now we know that this resiting occurred earlier rather than later, and further that almost certainly the timber Mark 1 was replaced by the Crich type Mark 4 at about the same time - probably during the war years.

Malden Green had been the site of bomb shelters during the war, so it's quite possible it was moved at that time. Certainly, the tattered paint in the earlier of the above photos would support a 1939-1944 age for it. We had previously theorized (lacking hard dates) that the Mark 4's were a WWII to immediate post-War replacement type for those Boxes damaged or destroyed during the war, immediately preceding the simplified, Bauhaus inspired Mark 5s (previously called Mark 3s, before we knew better) that started cropping up around 1952 to 1954. Mark 3's had been erected until at least mid-1938, and the distinct differences between the Mark 4's and all earlier types seemed to suggest a break in production and/or a new supplier.

So, in short, these particular photos are very important in pinning down the history and dating of the Crich type Box, as well as perhaps some of the earliest showing the darker paint (though only slightly, at this point) and white trim colour scheme that eventually became standard throughout the Met over the next ten years. Very cool stuff, so many, many thanks to Dalekoracle for coming across this source of postcards and information.

[Volpone]

So many late '40s/early '50s boxes!  Thanks, dalekoracle, so much for finding this!  And thanks hb88banzai (and everyone else), for going through it.