Finding Bruce Martin

When Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, began the campaign to save the K8 telephone box, she never dreamed of meeting its designer, 90-year-old architect Bruce Martin

The 90th birthday of an architect once well known, but now largely overlooked, was marked on 20 December 2007. In 1956, Bruce Martin was picked as one of Astragal's 'Men of the Year' (yes, they were all men) and was photographed, not at his desk or in front of a building, but next to a 'modular chart' of numbers printed on neat little coloured squares (AJ 19.01.56). He had been chosen 'for his enthusiastic study of modular coordination problems'.
I came across Martin as the designer of the last good-looking red phone box – the K8. I recognised his name as an architect from the post-war Hertfordshire Schools Programme, but knew nothing else about him. It seemed unlikely he would still be around to talk to.
What prompted my interest? Everyone knows about Giles Gilbert Scott and his K2 and K6 phone boxes. Years ago, the Twentieth Century Society, under then chairman and phone-box enthusiast Gavin Stamp, campaigned to get them listed as individual little buildings. It seemed a fairly outrageous suggestion at first, but now they are universally admired. However, there is one more classic phone box that is fast disappearing – in fact, it is about to become extinct, with only 12 working examples left, from the 11,000 that were originally produced.
Martin's K8 has the same overall proportions as its predecessors, and a similar robustness which subsequent versions singularly lack. As he explained when he was interviewed at its launch in 1968, the key to its success was a 'meticulous analysis of detail'. Scott's design uses 'lots of mouldings and 78- odd pieces of glass', making it very hard to clean and complex to assemble. Martin's design was an overall rationalisation of the K6, paring down its 450 pieces (without fixings) to just 183, including every single screw and nut. In fact, the K8 consists of just seven major components: a sill ring, two identical sides, a back panel, a door, a top sill ring and the roof. Instead of requiring factory assembly, it can be put together on site and configured in a huge number of different ways, such as switching the swing of the door to suit the surroundings.

 

Last year, after calling for volunteers across the country to photograph remaining K8s for us, a slot on Chris Evan's drive-time show on BBC Radio 2 put us in touch with a number of self-confessed phone-box addicts – that's when we heard that Martin was alive and well and living in Hertfordshire. One foggy winter afternoon, I drove out to meet him.
His home is a wonderful 15th-century thatched cottage, usually anonymous, but in anticipation of our arrival a handwritten notice had been shoved in the gate that read 'The Old Cottage'. It was renovated by Martin in the 1950s, before conservation requirements were remotely onerous. If you look closely, you can spot the frameless sliding glass panels inserted in place between medieval timbers to bring in more light – a Scandinavian detail of which he is justifiably proud. The first floor has been rebuilt in plywood. The house reads as a logical application of a straightforward solution using the best practical materials of the day, not as a self-conscious effort to do interventions in a contrasting Modern style (as is popular with English Heritage and others nowadays). Out in the garden stands a K8 box, and beyond the orchard is 'The New Studio', a square building with a shallow pyramidal roof, written up in AJ 25.02.81 as an example of self-build combined with direct labour.
Martin is very welcoming and sets about telling me his life story. We begin with his early life in Portsmouth, where his father worked as an engineer for the Admiralty. When he was 16, his father was transferred to run the naval dockyard in Hong Kong, and as Martin was still too young to start at the Architectural Association, he studied engineering for a couple of years. A trip out with P&O contrasted with a return journey on a Norwegian cargo ship, but the latter took him via Japan and San Francisco. He continued on to New York, and then did the final leg across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, where an introduction to the chief electrical engineer gave him the 'complete run' of the ship.
At the AA he met David Medd (later a colleague in Hertfordshire), and they travelled to Finland together on scholarships. Martin recalls taking a small-gauge, low-speed railway through the Finnish forests to Alvar Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium (1929-33). There weren't any stations; you simply jumped clear when you got to where you were going. The sanatorium was not yet 10 years old – still the latest thing – but the building that most impressed Martin was Erik Gunnar Asplund's Göteborg Town Hall Extension (1937). This was 'very influential' on him. 'It sunk in as being beautiful,' says Martin, and he felt 'not amazement, but love'. Pushed to explain why, he focuses his admiration on the way Asplund 'reconciled column systems of construction – grids – with free, curved partitions.'
Martin's study was interrupted by the Second World War, during which his engineering qualifications were put to good use. The experience he gained working on components for aircraft production was to serve him well. He responded to an advert for young architects to join Hertfordshire County Council at the end of the war, and enjoyed the atmosphere under county architect C H Aslin, who dubbed himself 'an umbrella man', nurturing new talent. He worked on 11 innovative school buildings, refining the steelframe system and adapting it to different sites.
The Hertfordshire Schools Programme is noted for its construction methods and its focus on providing an environment for child-centred education. Martin, however, barely mentions children, and it was clearly the technological challenges that inspired him. At the time of the 'Men of the Year' article, he had moved to the British Standards Institution and was working out of what 'was once a bathroom in a Mayfair block of luxury flats'. He was motivated by a desire to see the lessons of Hertfordshire applied to other building types, and to look at ways of coordinating dimensions for building components.
Our conversation drifts beyond architecture to travel – 'there's not a country in the northern half of the globe that I haven't visited' – and Martin recounted how he and his wife Barbara (who was an architect trained at Manchester) were on the first train from Russia to China. Barbara's interest in plants led to a friendship with the director of the Botanic Gardens of Tashkent in Uzbekistan during the Cold War period – a revelation as exotic as Martin's anecdote about his boyhood encounter with Lawrence of Arabia (apparently 'very full of himself ').
Darkness has engulfed the K8 in the garden, and we have hardly touched on phone boxes. I leave with a rich picture of a long and varied life, of opportunities unimaginable today, and of an architect with a passion not just for design, but for the meticulous process of building.

Resume: Bruce Martin talks Aalto, trans-Atlantic travel and Lawrence of Arabia, but barely mentions the K8. Perhaps a followup phone call is in order?