Max Stafford's Kennel

There are 19 remaining in-situ examples of this week’s transport beauty at the sides of roads across Britain, making journeys more interesting and attractive, and acting as a reminder of an age in which emergency communications were much more difficult than they are today. They are AA emergency telephone boxes, and they’re quite fabulous little buildings. Here’s one:

AA Box 442 on the A684 near West Burton. Photo by Humphrey Bolton [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Roadside emergency call boxes were installed in the early part of the 20th Century by the two great British motoring organisations, the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) and the Automobile Association (AA). The RAC was formed as the Automobile Club in 1897 (it got its “Royal” in 1907) to promote “the rights and best interests of motorists”. The AA was founded a few years later, in 1905 “to consider ways to overcome…