High on green hillsides overlooking the village of Fovant in Wiltshire, a dozen giant logos – some more than 50 metres across – can be seen carved into the chalk.

These designs date back to the first world war, when Fovant and the surrounding villages housed a transit camp for troops en route to and from the battlefields of the Western Front in France. In memory of fallen colleagues (and, no doubt, simply as a huge “Kilroy Was Here“), soldiers from various regiments painstakingly created representations of their cap badges.

Originally, there were many more badges, but nobody is quite sure how many have since faded away beneath the grass. Today, 12 remain, of which eight have been “adopted” for preservation by the Fovant Badges Society (due to lack of funds, four of them will not be saved).

The largest group of badges – nine of them – can be found on Fovant Down (they appear upside down on the aerial photos as they are carved on a north-facing hillside). They represent:

1. The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry. 2. The YMCA (which was an important provider of welfare services in the transit camps).

3. 6th Battalion, The City of London Regiment. 4. The Australian Imperial Force badge (the “Rising Sun”).

5. The Royal Corps of Signals. 6. The Wiltshire Regiment.

7. The London Rifle Brigade. 8. The Post Office Rifles.

9. The Devonshire Regiment.

All these (with the exception of the YMCA) will be preserved.

Further badges, which sadly will be left to fade away, can be seen on nearby Compton Down and Sutton Down:

10. An enormous map of Australia, carved by unknown soldiers from Down Under. 11. The Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

12. 7th Battalion, City of London Regiment.

Although the transit camps are long gone, there are still signs of a military presence in the area. The excellent Secret Bases website reveals that these mysterious shapes among the trees are the Fovant Wood Ordnance Depot, a munitions storage area for the nearby RAF base at Chilmark. That base closed down in the mid-1990s, although rumour has it that top secret goings-on still occur in and around the disused quarries…

Read more at the Fovant Badges Society website.

The humble red telephone kiosk is a much loved British icon, thanks to a long history on the streets of the United Kingdom. Today there are a fraction of the number there once were, but they are still a common enough sight that we can find some interesting ones to visit.

K2 model telephone boxes behind Enzo Plazzotta’s bronze, “Young Dancer”, on Broad Street, Covent Garden, London

The first recognisably “modern” red phone box was designed for a competition that the General Post Office held in 1924 to find a kiosk deemed acceptable to those London Boroughs that had refused to allow the erection of the previous K1 kiosks.

The winning entry, the K2, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott¹ and from 1926 was erected all over London. Scott had suggested they be built from steel and painted silver, but the Post Office decided to make the K2 in cast iron, and to paint it red.

K2 at Carfax Tower, Oxford

In 1929 the K3 was introduced, and although it was again designed by Gilbert Scott, this time they were painted cream. Like the K2 they were too expensive for widespread deployment, meaning that very few survive today, and as far as I can tell, there are none on street view. Instead here’s a picture of the only surviving K3 in Scotland.

The K4 model was designed by the Post Office, which isn’t surprising when you learn it had a post box and a stamp machine stuck on the back. Apparently phone users complained about the noise from the stamp machines so only 50 were ever made, and today only six of those survive. One of the surviving six is this one in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, which despite being hidden under a tree, I managed to spot using Bing Maps.

The K5 was a plywood kiosk for temporary use, so it was for the K6 model that the Post Office returned to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for his skills. Designed in 1935 to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V, the K6 was the first red kiosk to be used extensively outside of London, and thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city. By the time production ceased on the K6, there were nearly 70,000 across the UK.

K6, Regent Road, Edinburgh. Grade II listed.

K6 (with traffic cone), Jowett Walk, Oxford. Grade II listed.

The K7 model by Neville Conder never went to production, so it was up to Bruce Martin to carry on the fine tradition that Scott had begun, and in 1968 the true successor to the K6 was finally launched. Used mostly for new locations, the K8 was a slightly different shade of red, had a flatter roof, and only one big window on each side.

According to The Twentieth Century Society, today only twelve of the original K8s remain in working order², two of which are installed on the east side of the Erskine Bridge, just west of Glasgow.

Coinciding with the privatisation in 1984 of the Post Office’s telephone successor, British Telecom, a more utilitarian design of telephone box began to be introduced.

The classic K6 was widely replaced with the frankly hideous KX100, and basically we’ve all been complaining about it ever since. In the late 90s, BT made an attempt to win the public over to the KX range by introducing the KXPlus which is basically a KX100 with a red bar round the sides and a domed red roof. It didn’t work.

With the introduction of the KX100, around 2,000 existing boxes were given listed status, several thousand others were left in rural locations, but many more were sold off privately.

Lots of K6s have recently been restored and reinstalled in key tourism spots, but even more have been put to other uses; ranging from shower cubicles in private homes, through to this massive sculpture in Kingston upon Thames made of 12 tumbling boxes, entitled Out of Order.

There are several companies who specialise in selling and restoring old phone boxes, including Unicorn Kiosks, who are responsible for this 12-foot-tall custom kiosk in Maida Vale, London.

So if you’re one of the many fans of the classic red phone box, you’ve now got no excuse not to come up with a creative way to save a piece of Britain’s heritage, you’d just have to do is decide what to do with it!

Of course there are many more phone boxes around the world… have you got one near you?

For helping me research this post, many thanks go to Robert Ore of redphonebox.info, headington.org.uk, and www.cvphm.org.

Around 25 times a minute, 24 hours a day, this Russian shortwave radio station emits a short, monotonous buzz tone¹ on the AM frequency at 4625 kHz.

The station’s callsign is “UVB-76″, but is known amongst enthusiasts as “The Buzzer”, and the sound it transmits has been on an almost continuous loop since it was first observed in 1982.

No one knows for sure what the purpose of the signal is, and in 27 years the buzzing has only been interrupted on 3 occasions.

At 21:58 GMT on Christmas Eve 1997, 15 years after it was first observed, the buzzing abruptly stopped; to be replaced by a short series of beeps, followed by a male voice speaking Russian who repeated the following message several times:

“Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14″.

On September 12th 2002 another voice was heard, this time so distorted that only part of the message could be recognised:

“UVB-76, UVB-76. 62691 Izafet 3693 8270″.

Finally, on February 21st 2006, a third message² was transmitted which said:

“75-59-75-59. 39-52-53-58. 5-5-2-5. Konstantin-1-9-0-9-0-8-9-8-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka. Konstantin 8-4. 9-7-5-5-9-Tatiana. Anna Larisa Uliyana-9-4-1-4-3-4-8.”

The names used in the message are used in some Russian spelling alphabets, and although some people speculate that UVB-76 is a specialised Numbers Station, used to transmit encoded messages to spies, the messages have never been decoded, and the actual purpose of this station remains unknown.

There’s more information about the mysterious UVB-76 at WIkipedia. Thanks to Best of Wikipedia.

We’ve looked at many of the world’s largest things in the past, so for something different, let’s look at the longest. Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna is the world’s longest residential building, stretching more than a kilometre through the 19th district better known for large houses and diplomatic residences.

The building consists of almost 1,400 apartments, meant to house up to 5,000 people. The design included amenities such as a swimming pool, library, laundries, shops, a school and medical facilities. Only the eastern side of the building stretches the full 1,100 metres, but in many sections there are blocks on the western side of the development which create internal courtyards and parks for the residents.

It was constructed by city planner Karl Ehn as part of the Socialist Party’s Red Vienna movement which saw huge quantities of public housing constructed when private housing development was unfeasible due to rent freezes. A special tax was imposed to allow these massive constructions to proceed, while the use of renowned architects ensured the buildings were varied and visually attractive, something very apparent on Bing Maps’ bird’s eye view.

The apartments were some of the first in the city to each include a toilet, running water and balconies – luxuries that workers of the time had never experienced before. Today, however, they are less desirable due to their small size and the fact that many don’t have showers or other modern facilities.

Several tunnels had to be incorporated into the design to allow the continuation of city streets and traffic flow.

The building suffered heavy damage during the Austrian Civil War of 1934 when military and police forces took severe action, bombarding the building to force out unarmed families and Party workers who were barricaded inside.  This damage wasn’t repaired until some years after World War 2.

Many pictures of Karl Marx Hof can be found at the Great Buildings website.

This rather innocuous-looking bridge over the River Thames is the latest in a long line of bridges to stand on this spot and lay claim to the name London Bridge.

This current bridge opened in 1973, but a bridge has existed at or near this very spot since the Roman occupation of the area, around 2,000 years ago. There were a number of bridges during this time, but it wasn’t until 1209 that a truly great bridge was erected.

The Medieval London Bridge took a seriously lengthy 33 years to build, but it would have been pretty impressive in its day, as it was completely covered in shops set in the base of buildings seven stories tall!

For 600 years the Medieval bridge was a bustling and relatively safe haven in the centre of London, but eventually it was decided that it was too old, narrow and decrepit¹ to serve Londoners any longer, and that it should be replaced.

In 1799 Thomas Telford proposed a bridge with a single iron arch that would span the entire river, but it was rejected due to worries about feasibility. The bridge that was finally completed in 1831 was built 30 m west of the Medieval one, and was designed by Scots civil engineer John Rennie.

By 1896 the “New” London bridge had become the busiest point in London (with around 9,000 people crossing every hour), so it was widened by 4 metres to combat the acute congestion. On the disused railway track at the old Swelltor Quarry on Dartmoor, you can still see left over granite pillars that were quarried as part of this process, but never used.

Unfortunately the bridge couldn’t cope with the extra weight – after widening, it began to sink by about 3 cm every 8 years, meaning that yet another new bridge would be required.

However, instead of knocking the bridge down, in 1967 the City of London council hit upon the brilliant idea of putting the bridge up for sale; and on 18 April 1968, Rennie’s bridge was sold to the American entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2.4m dollars, and subsequently moved, brick-by-brick to Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

The story goes that McCulloch mistakenly believed he was buying (the frankly much more desirable) Tower Bridge, but of course this has been vehemently denied. Regardless, the reconstructed London Bridge forms the centrepiece of a English-style theme park that has since become Arizona’s second most popular tourist attraction, being only less-visited than the Grand Canyon.

(London Bridge was previously featured back in 2006 before the advent of Street View).