The High Wycombe Boxes

[lym]

This is quite possibly the topic I'm most excited by. Firstly, I'd like to give huge credits to banzai for making these findings all the way back at the very start of 2015 (it's been that long without a topic made!): http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=5909.msg70630#msg70630, and to Pete for sending me the photos.

To begin, from what I've gathered from reading old threads and conversing with petewilson, he had heard some rumours of TARDIS-style police boxes located in High Wycombe. Now, if you've visited the Met box catalog, you'll probably realise that High Wycombe is outside of the Met's jurisdiction. But Banzai discovered something that shook the foundations of police box research. After finding the locations on OS maps, he found this aerial photo of London Road, taken on 6 May 1949:



Hmmmm. Let's zoom in a little.



Centre frame. There's something very odd here.



White and glimmering, could that be an unpainted Met box? It certainly looks like one. Either way, it seems the rumours Pete had heard of TARDIS-type boxes were true after all. Or rather, one box; probably all of these ones, sourced from banzai's post I linked earlier:

• the junction of London Road and Gordon Road outside the The Pheasant P.H. (northwest corner - 1966)
•West Wycombe Road, north side, around 50 yards or so to the east of Desborough Park Road (1965-1967)
•the junction (east corner) of Chapel Lane, Mill End Road, Lane End Road and New Road opposite the Sands Primary School and an un-named P.H. (Note: further research shows that this is called The Hour Glass)
•the southeast/east corner of Amersham Road and Arnison Avenue

These are the four confirmed boxes, although looking into it, somebody has said there was one on Green Lane (which is quite far away outside the main town), but unfortunately there's no OS map coverage for that location to confirm this. Allegedly they were blue like the London boxes, but why this one is white or unpainted is anyone's guess.

I've looked and looked and found no other pictures, so if anyone's looking, those locations are where you're best off searching for, and hopefully we'll come across some others in the future.

[Kingpin]

Cool stuff.

Here's a contemporary photo of the location in the aerial photos:



Comparing the two photos, it looks like the box was located roughly where the lamppost is now stood (and I don't know if it's anything beyond a sheer coincidence - but there appear to be two telephone line access hatches set into that stretch of pavement running past the Ford dealership, with the one closest to where the box once stood set closer to the roadway than the other - was this hatch closer to the road because of the Police Box which may have been there at the time?)

Addendum

Here's a link to the London Road photograph from Pete's research:

Britain From Above

[Kingpin]

Reverse angle of the first London Road photo:



Britain From Above: EAW023171 (1949)

[lym]

Indeed. I should point out that this location of the photograph doesn't quite match with the one on the OS map (circa 1966), so it was likely resited due to the construction of the garage.



I'm still not sure if there were any besides this one and the other three since the OS map coverage goes a bit iffy once you go more rural. But I'm certainly going to keep looking for more photos; whether I'll actually find any is anyone's guess.

[Kingpin]

The other tricky thing of course is the time period, I feel like I've seen a reasonable smattering of photos covering High Wycombe in the general Victorian/Edwardian period, and of the 60s-80s... I don't feel quite so confident about the 20s/30s/40s.

Though that being said, I've heard reference to a large photographic archive more than a few times either through the Bucks Free Press, or through conversations with people I know who work for the County Council.

Here's a contemporary photo of the relocation spot noted in the OS map:



And an archive photo, showing the box definitely gone by 1989:



Comparing the OS map against the contemporary photos and archive photos, it also seems clear the junction between Gordon Road and London Road was widened (sometime between the 1970s and 1980s), which may have also led to the removal of the curved wall that appears to be noted on the map.

[Kingpin]

Whilst going through the archive photos on SWOP: Sharing Wycombe's Old Photographs I came across this photo from 1966:





-Which may be the Police Box noted as residing on the eastern/south-eastern corner of the junction of Amersham Road and Arnison Avenue.

Contemporary photo:

[lym]

Yep! Pete had mentioned that photo to me, although it's such a low resolution image that it's hard to make anything out. It does seem to be the same type of box (unpainted/white too, like the Pheasant box), but it's difficult to tell. I wonder if the library would have any photographs there.

[hb88banzai]

Interesting seeing people go through the same motions we went through a few years ago. Hopefully the intervening time will have added more photos to find like with the Met area.

Cutting a bit in line of things to do, but now that it's been started by lymerence I'll pull together all the maps and other photos we have of the Boxes and Posts in High Wycombe, such as they are (I see Kingpin already found some - and yes, that is where the OS maps placed the Amersham Road Box), along with what anecdotes were gleaned from searches and enquiries.

Just to whet the appetite, though, this is the earliest view we have of a High Wycombe Box, the one on West Wycombe Road and dated 24 Mar 1937 --



Centre of frame here. Unfortunately, as with most of the rest of High Wycombe, the earliest map that shows it is from the mid-1960s, but at least we know from this photo that some version of these boxes were in place before the war.

I'll try to get better captures and see if they can be enhanced any more, together with better copies of the map extracts I acquired at the time.

More later.

[lym]

Exciting times, even if it is about 3 and a half years late For a few months I was waiting for a thread to be made about the boxes since I didn't have the photos (which I actually could have found on my own just by looking on Britain From Above since I had the locations - d'oh), but excitement got the better of me and I caved and asked Pete for the pics, and I'm glad I did.

Interesting to see how the box in the photo from 1937 appears to be a dark colour as opposed to the bare concrete look of them from the other aerial photos. As I mentioned earlier, I did come across a couple of anecdotes that said the boxes were blue, at least in the 1960s, but once again Pete beat me to it - the anecdotes I found were actually in response to a question Pete himself had asked on a Facebook page for High Wycombe! All my searches have probably already been covered by the both of you long ago, but I do like the search for information 

[hb88banzai]

And if you note, the roof looks like it might be a bit different as well, though that could be a bush or small tree behind it confusing things. Incredibly hard to tell because it's at extreme range in the pic and with the typical pre-WWII heavy film grain in aerial photos.

Oh, and don't give up just because you think we've been there before. Any given day can change what is available on the net - it's a very fluid thing.

In fact, here are a couple new things I just found:

The Pheasant P.H. as it appeared circa 1916 --



And more interestingly, a reverse view of it from 1975, including the area where the Box stood --



The Box appears to be gone at this point (would be about where the left edge of the bus is - hard to be absolutely certain as there is something there beyond the mid-property fence (visually at least - pattern, if not object), it's just not sufficiently "boxy" to be convincing).

It appears on the 1967 and 1968 maps, but is gone by the 1975-1986 composite map (though in checking, the Pheasant was actually on the portion published in 1986, so not confirmation of its absence in 1975).

[Kingpin]

I had no idea the extension to the Pheasant was that old, it'd always struck me as a modern (ie, no older than the 80s) addition because of its lack of achitectural harmony with the rest of the pub.

[lym]

I have hopes that there's a few more undiscovered pics out there, just because of the law of large numbers. There's so many coincidental photos of London boxes (some which just happened to be taken at the right time to have unique things like being mid-painting) that there must be some more of these ones. Granted, it's a little more difficult as there's only four (potentially a couple more) compared to London's several hundred, but the fact we have a photo of the Dover box and the other prototypes taken in the right place at the right time gives me a lot more hope.

[Kingpin]

A contemporary view of site of the West Wycombe Road box:



The box would've stood roughly around the point where that wooden fence is visible, in front of a house called (at least at one point) Leyfield.

While it's largely a pair of light blobs separated by a dark blob in the photo ("blobs?"), you can see Leyfield's distinctive dormer window/chimney configuration that's present on the side of the house:

[lym]

Good work. For the record, this is the location of the last (confirmed) box:



And a contemporary view, noting that the area has been modified pretty extensively:

[lym]

Found another anecdote that says the boxes were blue at one point: http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/16206185.nostalgia-a-new-life-in-booker-hill-part-one/

Other buildings were the adjacent Hour Glass pub, two small wooden huts at the junction of New Road and Lane End Road (both since destroyed), and a blue police box on the opposite pavement.

This annoyingly low-resolution image was included with the article:



Taken in 1940 so there should theoretically be a box there, but I'm not seeing one.