Red Oxide Inside

Well, we finally have some red oxide on the inside of the kiosk! Only a couple of weeks later than we had hoped, but the end result looks good. Actually Alan did the painting as I had some Explorer Scouts skydiving today. It's worth clicking on the picture and viewing the higher res version as it nicely shows the pre-drilled holes in the frames where the brass pins will eventually sit.

More surprises for us, when we tapped that cylindrical bit shown in the left of the picture we discovered it is plastic. I'll speak to Unicorn and ask them how we should handle it.

Not shown here is the door where a lot of effort went into trying to clean some of the original panes of glass that we are leaving in the kiosk. These have come up really well, which is quite a relief.

I've included this photo partly because it shows the red oxide to the top of the west side, but far more interestingly it highlights the lazyness of BT staff when repainting the kiosk over the years. The white paint should come down to the bar immediately below the TELEPHONE glass. I suspect the white has never been repainted, and when we do finally get to that point, we will restore that section of the kiosk back to its original colour scheme.

The white inside a kiosk was designed to reflect the original light bulbs in the kiosk. At some point a flourescent tube was put inside, the electrics of which are still there today. With our mainly white posters in the kiosk, and the correct paint scheme, the kiosk should be quite bright of an evening.

This week, the Woking News & Mail continued their coverage of the kiosk by asking shoppers in Woking whether they backed the work we are doing in a kind of 'Have your say'. It was a resounding yes, which is great for Brookwood village seeing as most responses bemoaned the destruction of our heritage. It just seems that stuff disappears so easily these days. When I was working on the kiosk recently, I had a chat with a chap from Pirbright who moaned that Pirbright's K6 kiosk is in very poor condition, I can confirm that it is.

Nothing will happen this coming week directly on the kiosk until the weekend due to work committments, however we expect to get some of the large glazing frames made up, as well as cleaning up some of the small glazing frames which we have removed.