Red Icons – The Cultural Emblems of London

Look around you, London is ablaze with red icons and they are not just any shade of red. They are Pantone 485C…the colour of our London buses, Royal Mail, London Underground, the Union Jack, the Coldstream Guards and the Beefeaters at the Tower of London. What is the cause of this rash of redness?

Why Are Our Cultural Icons Red?

Perhaps the fault lies with our long line of monarchs? Our flag designers? Or our military garment manufacturers?

In fact, we probably need to thank the management of the London General Omnibus Company.

A Bus Company Randomly Chooses Red

In the 18th century, there were several different bus companies who ploughed up and down the streets of London with green, yellow, brown and maroon liveries. Then in 1907, the London and General Omnibus company merged with the Vanguard Motor Bus Company and became the leading bus operator in the capital.

The Vanguard Motor Bus Company took a momentous decision that would shape our lives and photography forever, they decided to paint all their buses a cardinal red.

And we don’t know why!

There were no meeting minutes. It could be because red is a symbolic colour for England but the most likely explanation is that it made the buses easy to spot. Imagine an elderly English gent with failing eye sight (and without recourse to the NHS which was a later 1940s initiative), he needed to be able to spot the bus amongst the dense London smog, get his pennies ready and prepare to board.

“Prior to 1907, it was common to see buses in green, brown, yellow and maroon.

Red Pillar Boxes Were a Red Icon Forerunner

The red of course wasn’t entirely plucked from nowhere, our streets were already littered with Royal Mail pillar boxes which had been in use since 1852.

Then Came Our Emblematic Red Icon – The K2 Red Phone Booth

And after the red buses came the red telephone boxes. In 1924 Sir Giles Gilbert Scott won a competition for the redesign of the red phone kiosk (known as K2). This was famously made of cast iron and smelled of urine – an indelible feature of my teen years spent ringing boyfriends out of earshot of nosy parents.

London Underground Creates Yet Another Red Icon

Things must have snowballed from there, as London Underground adopted red for its logo and red for the Central line on the tube map – symbolically, this line goes through the heart of London.

London Underground Adopted the same Colour Red as Buses and Pillar Boxes for its Logo

Then It Was the Turn of One of our Famous Chocolate Brands

And then Nestle used red on the packaging of Kit Kat one of our most famous bars of chocolate

Margaret Thatcher Launches “Buy British” with the Union Jack

In the 1980s, we had Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, who berated us to buy British to revive the failing economy. Companies up and down the country used the Union Jack on their labels to signify British made goods. The Union Jack thereby became a symbol for quality against an influx of supposedly cheaper fruits and vegetables from South Africa and inferior goods from Hong Kong.

Then we had Cool Britannia and punk rock…

Cool Brittania and the Skin Head Movement Used Red British Motifs

…and the England Football Team and some rather nasty right wingers (not to mention the Labour Party with their Red Rose insignia and Red Flag anthem) and before we knew it our streets, our homes, our shops were emblazoned with red, white and blue, billowing in every direction in a dystopian nightmare.

Fast Food Gets on the Red Icons Bandwagon

And just as we were coming up for air, it was the turn of fast food…Wimpy Bars, Coca Cola and then Macdonald’s cheekily turned to patriotism and used our primary red colour for their logos.

Macdonalds Used the same Pantone Red at the Base of its Yellow Arches Logo

The cultural elite thought they were safe from this onslaught until the artists of the modern age started to adopt our red cultural icons for their own purposes…Pop Art was on the bandwagon and our galleries were no longer safe from red.

And as with anything, London tourists got a taste for red; they wanted some of the action, our flags, our buses, our underground symbols, our beefeaters, our phone boxes. Things at this point started getting seriously out of hand as we began to disseminate cheap plastic souvenirs in Pantone Red 485C to all nations of the world.

Even Las Vegas, with enough kitsch of its own, was given the Gordon Ramsay restaurant with its iconic K2 phone booth doors.

Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chip Restaurant in Las Vegas has K2 Phone Booth Doors

And before we knew it the whole world was drowning, not waving or basking, in LONDON RED. And all (in my view) because an unknown person, in an undocumented meeting, decided to paint their London bus fleet red.

If you would like to spot some of our famous red icons, why not try some of these free and cheap sightseeing ideas.

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