There used to be one object in every English village that stood out as a symbol of stable government and a refuge to the traveller: the telephone booth. This cast iron structure in imperial red was designed in 1924 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Like many architects who worked in the Indian summer of the British empire, Scott was eclectic, able to draw on classical, Gothic and proto-modern motifs in order to provide a rich vocabulary of detail, responsive to the new demands of the industrial age. His telephone booth is a case in point. Classical in outline and inspired by Sir John Soane's tomb for his wife in Saint Pancras churchyard, it is nevertheless an unashamed product of industrialism, with a suggestion of Bauhaus naughtiness in its fenestration. So suitable did this form prove to the streets and villages of England that it would often be seen on Christmas cards, upright in a sea of snow, beside the Gothic spire, the gabled cottage and the five-barred gate. It was a paradigm of what street architecture should be: permanent, dignified, expressing an idea of legitimate order.
With the privatisation of the telephone network, Britain took a giant leap into the future. The first sign of this was the rapid disappearance of Scott's familiar landmark in favour of a barbarous concoction in alloy and shatterproof glass, of the kind familiar from the streets of New York. The new telephone booth is often open to the elements and to the commotion of the city street. It offers neither shelter nor privacy to its occupant; it is void of style or architectural meaning. It represents not stability and lawful order but movement and unceasing change; it is a visible reminder of the futility of listening for ancestral voices amid the din of the city. You do not enter the New York telephone booth, but reach out to it as you pass. It is not the reassuring symbol of a permanent home, with which you can at any moment make soothing contact. It is a place from which you cry for help into a void from which help can never come.
This contrast illustrates a profound change in our perception of public space. The street is the public place par excellence, where the city impresses its character on those who live in it and vindicates, if it can, the society which it exists to sustain. The design of a city street was never, in the great epochs of civilisation, left to chance. The height, alignment, fenestration, and doorways of city houses were the subject of regulation, and the objects that were placed in the street for the benefit of passers-by confirmed their sense of a common way of life.
This is one reason why the classical styles acquired such stability: they enshrined an idea of legitimacy. A classical doorway does not need the sign marked "entrance;" the classical steps need no supplement of words to direct the attention and the movement of those who walk on them. The use and meaning of a building were laid before the public in a series of visual cues which both expressed and endorsed the common purposes of civic life.
That is why classical railway stations, such as Penn Station in New York, destroyed during the 1960s, had so few verbal markings: you knew at once, from the height and proportions of the arches, and the dialogue of mouldings, exactly where to buy your ticket, or catch your train. Contrast this with the modern airport, in which a babel of words cries out on every side-because the architecture, in its uniform stylelessness, is mute.
This babel of signs has erupted also in our streets. The fa?ades of shops bear no mark of the goods contained in them; doorways are obscured, unembellished, scarcely noticeable without an explicit "entrance" sign. Bus stops are mere posts, on which "bus stop" must be written if we are to know their use. Even churches and chapels, whose Gothic porches make unambiguous display of their function, are now equipped with billboards, lest people should be unaware of their use.
At the same time, the design of street furniture has become subservient to function. The old bus shelter in my English village is a cottage-like cabin, built of local stone and designed to blend into its surroundings. The modern bus shelter is an assembly of metal-framed screens, with no other meaning than its function-which it performs badly, precisely because it is the only function that it performs. Just as a house ceases to be a home when built as a "machine for living," so does a shelter cease to be a shelter when built as a "machine for standing in." Ever since Jane Jacobs's devastating attack on the modernist theories of town planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it has been clear that the "disaggregation of functions" in the modern city is a primary cause of social disaffection. Modernist planning-which places shops in one place, homes in another, parks in another, offices in yet another-compels people to be constantly on the move and deprives them of the city as their collective home. It is the same with neighbourhoods as with street furnishings: those designed purely according to an idea of their function are unable to fulfil it-unable to fulfil it, that is, in a human way.
Consider the English post-box-a wonderful structure which can be found, thanks to the Empire, in every corner of the globe. Like the old-fashioned telephone booth, the English "pillar-box" has a permanent air. Its base and cornice, its solid cast iron structure and its open mouth emphasised by mouldings are, from the point of the functionalist architect, entirely superfluous, a waste of labour and materials. But in fact, they are precisely what is necessary to create confidence in the national post office: placing your letters in such a box, through such a decisive aperture, you feel that they are in safe hands and already on the way to their destination.
And so it has always been. Our postal service has remained reliable, able to deliver a letter safely within a day. The contrast with the US postal service is evident-and evident also to the eye, in the functional stylelessness of the US post-box. During my first stay in the US, I refused to place letters in that tin receptacle, unable to believe that anyone would deliver them. It looked like junk, and promised to make junk of everything dropped into it. It provides a clear illustration of how explicit functionality is the enemy of function.
Such examples show that solidity and self-confidence are just as important as style. This is illustrated by another American instance: the city fire hydrant. The fire hydrant has become one of the few reliable symbols of urbanity in US cities: the solid cast iron structure, with its polished brass caps, standing rooted in its own inviolable space, expresses the vigilant guardianship of the city, durable, immovable and prepared for emergency. It is a visible pledge that the city intends to live longer than its local disasters.
When it comes to lighting, the old gas lamp was designed to stand in the street like a soldier, smartly dressed, unflinching and reliable. The modern sodium lamp has a flimsy and slovenly appearance. It hangs above the street in a half-completed arch, its unembellished curve clashing equally with the upright housefronts and the horizontal pavement. In a high wind it rattles with an air of precarious impermanence: at any moment it might lose its balance and come crashing down. Its being has been absorbed into its function.
Street lighting is a gauge of security, a sign that the city has eyes. Even so, people seem to be less interested in the quantity of light than in its source. The cold, hard stare of the modern street lamp is received more as a threat than a comfort. Its shadowless glare seems to sweep the street of its social meanings, robbing us of intimacy and inviting the very danger against which it warns.
One final instance: the public lavatory. In the street where I passed my childhood, there stood an iron chapel in forest green, the sections of which had been cast in the form of cathedral arches, decorated with leaf mouldings and filled with sheets of perforated metal. Only the word "gentlemen," in black Gothic lettering on a framed window of opalescent glass, indicated the building's function. And not a soul objected to its presence, so much did this sanctuary add dignity to our undistinguished terraces. In place of this happy solution to a permanent human problem, we now have transportable cabins of pale cement, with sliding metal doors which give the appearance of a space capsule. They have neither roots in the pavement nor orientation to surrounding buildings but are dumped in the street like trash cans.
Architects are, thankfully, beginning to take street furniture seriously again. Nevertheless, we need to think hard about why the modern styles have so often failed to do justice to the street. Why is it that in this most simple matter, so clearly understood by architects and city fathers from ancient Athens to the eve of the first world war, the wisdom of ages was so suddenly thrown away? Some will blame the corruption of popular taste; others will point accusingly to the market. But these are shallow explanations. In public matters there is no genuine market, because choices are made not by the citizens but on their behalf. And when the voice of the public is heard, it calls out for traditional designs and seems dissatisfied with their modern substitutes.
We are self-conscious beings, aware of our temporary nature. The city is the symbol of our defiance: the monument to human aspiration and the pledge that life will endure in something like its present mould. The city depends upon elaborate self-restraint and courtesy; it functions only because the millions who inhabit it make tacit bargains with their neighbours, renouncing force for agreement in countless tiny transactions as they jostle in the streets and markets, queue for buses, take their seats in cinemas, or pass one another in the park.
Once we have understood the real nature of street furniture, as a symbol of permanent civil order in the stream of time, we will recognise that it matters very much how we design it. There are many reasons for the growth of crime and disorder in our city streets, and architecture is low down the list of causes. Nevertheless, we should not ignore the fact that the standards of conduct and courtesy required by life in a modern conurbation are not easily produced. The astonishing fact is not that people rob, rape and murder in modern cities, but that they don't. Only a vigilant self-denial can make the arrangement work. And it has to work, since the city is the heart of modern society, the place where all decisions are made.
The old street furniture engendered and endorsed a civic attitude among those who lived with it. The growing disorder of the modern city stems at least in part from the fact that it has lost its air of permanence. The city-the heart of modern society-has become as disposable to the eye as the discarded junk drifting through its streets.
