Cyan is the new TARDIS blue

I ended up in central London over the weekend, intending to spend the whole day at a Radiophonic Workshop event on the South Bank.
It didn’t quite shape up as I thought it was going to be (everything got way to technical for a casual listener), so kicking my heals with time to kill, I thought I’d do something I had been wanting to do for a while - revisit the Police Posts around the City Of London.

I first visited and documented them in 2010, but one I had expected to find at Liverpool Street Station was strangely missing. This I listed as missing in action.
The rest were still there, but in a pretty sorry state of repair, especially one on the Victoria Embankment.

On a passing return trip in 2011 I noticed several of the posts I had photographed had also since vanished. Being made of cast iron, I did have concerns they had been stolen by metal thieves, a crime on the rise due to commodity values soaring in recent years.

But last month I spotted a photograph on a Facebook friend's page, showing the Liverpool Street Police Post. It was back - and sporting a new paint job!

It's got me wondering if the other missing posts had received the same restoration - hence my plan to revisit them now.

I took a tour of all the posts under the control of the City Of London authority. Here is what I found.

TARDIS spotting

Last year I ran a piece on the various surviving Police Posts & Boxes that can be found around London.

Well, this weekend I was watching a rather kitsch Hammer film from the 1960s called The Anniversary. It’s not one of Hammer’s finest, but it does have an amazingly over the top performance by Bette Davis, who’s entrance in the film has to be seen to be believed!

It was shot at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood (less than a mile from where I live) in May 1967 with a scene filmed inside a shop on the local high street.

The Anniversary

It was during this scene I suddenly realised that in the background, on the opposite side of the street, was a full sized original Metropolitan Police Box, just the same as Matt Smith’s! (see right, right side of frame)

Annoyingly it is part obscured for its brief appearance, but it’s there nevertheless!

Eleven TARDISES for Eleven Doctors

If you’ve been reading my other blogs, you’ll have seen that I’ve met up with a number of fellow Who fans and taken them on guided tours of London and the sights to see Who-related.
Amongst my regular stop-off points are the Earls Court Police box and the two Police Posts at Picadilly Circus and St Martin Le Grand.

I always knew of the Picadilly one, but it was some time before I found out about the one near St Pauls. With little other information, I always assumed (the eighth deadly sin) that that was that was left.

But following my latest write-up about the tour with Mark Ferris, a friend contacted me to let me know he had spotted another one, this time in Grosvenor Square, a stones throw from the current American Embassy. What?? There’s THREE? Sure enough, after looking it up on Google Street View I found it.

That got me thinking and so I did some digging on the net and discovered - to my amazement - there are actually ELEVEN surviving Police Posts in the Greater London area. This needed further investigation, so I have been to visit all of them, and here ther are:


View London POLICE POSTS in a larger map