10 Most British Doctor Who Moments

2. The TARDIS Police Box

These days the image of the TARDIS is quintessentially British in its own right. So it’s easy to forget that it borrowed from another, long-forgotten piece of British design: the police box.

Essentially miniature police stations, from which officers could hold prisoners and members of the public could report crimes, police boxes were a regular sight on the streets of Britain from the 1920s and 1960s, and would have been very familiar to original Doctor Who viewers.

In universe the TARDIS looks like a police box because that’s the form it took when the First Doctor and Susan arrived in 1960s London, right before the chameleon circuit stopped working.

But of course the real, creative reason was to ground the show in the everyday. It’s one thing to ask viewers to accept a bigger-on-the-inside time machine. But if you disguise that time machine as something familiar, that you might find on a random street corner, then it becomes real.

And what of those original police boxes? Most were destroyed, but some still exist – mainly in Glasgow, where there are no less than six! Historically these boxes were red. But due to the Doctor Who effect, most of them are now blue.

More centrally there’s a replica police box in London outside Earl’s Court Tube station, which is a popular photo spot for fans and non-fans alike.