The Mark 2 Metropolitan Police box, originally designed by the force’s ‘architect surveyor’ Gilbert MacKenzie Trench, was simply street furniture familiar to denizens of London and Glasgow (other forces used boxes of different designs). All that changed in November 1963, when it was reimagined as the outward shape of a time and space machine, bigger on the inside; a magic portal to impossible places in the fourth and fifth dimensions.
Incredibly, Trench’s box has now been internationally recognised as the TARDIS for far longer than it was ever in police service. Originally installed between 1929 and 1938, the boxes were points of direct free telephone access to the nearest police station, for use by police and public alike. Inside would be a stool, a small table, brushes and dusters, an electric fire and a fire extinguisher, any of which might come in handy for officers on the street. If the station needed to contact a patrol officer in that area, the lamp on top flashed to signal an alert. Since the vast majority of homes didn’t have a landline telephone until the 1960s, the police box was a valued beacon of security in British everyday life for nearly four decades.
The boxes themselves were essentially small buildings that stood 9ft 4ins (2.8m) tall and 4ft 6ins (1.4m) wide, made of pre-cast concrete (not wood) with a single teak door. The Mark 2 version improved on the original design by changing the sign above the door to read ‘Police Public Call Box’ (from ‘Police Public’) and moving the St John’s Ambulance motif on the door to the panel directly below the window, up from the panel below that. This became the template for the original TARDIS prop designed by Peter Brachacki for An Unearthly Child (aka 100,000 BC, 1963), although it was built a couple of feet shorter than the real thing.