Dover Police box

[mikey]

Ah well you can't win them all

[domvar]

Merged

[mikey]

I was talking to Peter John this morning who prompted me to have a look at Dover. I'm glad he did because this pic popped up on the IWM website from 1941.

Unmistakably the Lord Warden Hotel box is a Met box, But I don't believe it was used as a police box. Hence the no OS map listing no phone door, top signs or signal lamp. It also explains why it's a different design to the other Dover boxes. I think it's a sentry box while the hotel was being used as Dover's Coastal Command naval base HMS Wasp. This would also explain why it was not there for very long.





If anyone wants the original larger photo it is free to download for non commercial purposes here https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205143705

This also raises the interesting question, was this a common practice in WWII? Did the MOD buy/requisition unfinished boxes from the manufacturers? Are there Mackenzie trench boxes sitting on abandoned WWII bases?

Thank you Peter!

[dr hue]

Great find. You could be right about a sentry box.

Tried to enhance images a little:

x1:



x2:









I wish we had better pictures of the High Wycombe "Met" Boxes:

https://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=9006.0

[mikey]

They look much better

I would dearly like to see a High Wycombe box too, but I have had no luck so far.

[Volpone]

No paint from the look of it too.  Just the bare concrete, I'll warrant. 

[lym]

Amazing! Glad we've finally gotten another pic of this, met box oddities always intrigue and excite me. So much mystery.

I still occasionally check for more High Wycombe box pics, but to no avail unfortunately. You'd think it would be easier considering there was presumably around four of them.

[peterjohn]

Just found this.  Non-Met Box, but not startlingly dissimilar.

https://www.dover.uk.com/forums/dover-forum/police-box

Already posted twice on this very thread by Domvar and Mikey! 

[mikey]

Earlier design of Dover police box here on Buckland Bridge next to the Buckland paper mill.





This box was installed in 1932 alongside boxes in Cherry Tree Avenue and the Market Square. By 1933 the boxes where considered by the town council to be unsightly with the town surveyor drawing up plans for a concrete box designed to look similar to the public telephone boxes in the town at a cost of £48 to replace the market place box.

It looks likes the Market place box (pictured further up this thread) and the boxes in Newport are the design of the Dover borough surveyor or the surveyor simply copied the Newport design. Don't know yet.

Interestingly these 1932 wooden boxes where not the first boxes in Dover. There are references to earlier boxes which must have been of another design as the council clearly wasn't upset with the design of them.

Location of other boxes where:

London road river bottom of Whitfield hill
River police box
Dockyard
East cliff
Limekiln street
Kearsney


The earliest reference to a police box I can find is 1924 in an report referring to a box at the Dockyard. Which would make Dover one of the first places in the UK to have them.