London Is Looking For Ideas To Replace ‘Obsolete’ Blue Police Boxes
Image via cowardlion / Shutterstock.com
The blue Police Boxes, propelled to pop-culture fame by Doctor Who, are just as quintessential to the streets of Greater London as its buses. Unfortunately, the public telephone kiosks, built to communicate with the police, are now redundant in this era and serve more as ornamental fragments of urban architecture.
Stressing that security challenges have evolved since Police Boxes sprung up around the metropolitan area in the 1930s, the City of London is hoping to commission designers to come up with “modern, multifunctional” replacements for them.
In partnership with the City of London Police, New London Architecture (NLA), and Bloomberg Associates, the City of London is now open to pitches to redesign the Police Boxes into “Digital Service Points,” with £250,000 (US$341,000) being dedicated to each structure, Design Week reports.
The revamped constructions should “seamlessly blend in” to current infrastructure. Considering the true purpose of the traditional Police Boxes, they should also feature a digital touch screen on the exterior so members of the public can report crimes or accidents.
They’ll also require interior space for a docking station, where a display, Wi-Fi connectability, keyboard, and mouse will be, to enable police processes.
Being wired for the digital era, however, opens the structures up for more possibilities, such as the ability to use them for directions, travel updates, or to look up event programs.
The City of London envisions installing the new Digital Service Points in parks, car parking lots, and “areas with high foot fall,” but designers are also welcome to propose other locations for them.
To read the creative brief in full, please head here.
[via Design Week, cover image via cowardlion / Shutterstock.com]
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