TARDIS: Time And Relative Dimension In Space

Hello All. Hope the weather where you are is as good as the weather has been here (well with the exception of today maybe). Today’s Post is about the overlapping of two of my favorite things in the world: Doctor Who and Historic Preservation. For those who might not know (but after this is over you’ll probably want to run out and watch it all on Netflix), Doctor Who is a British television show about an alien (The Doctor) who travels through time and space in a time machine that looks like a 1950’s/60’s Police Call Box called the TARDIS (which stand for Time And Relative Dimension In Space). The Doctor (almost) always has a human companion (most often a spunky girl/woman) who accompanies him on his travels. Now I know that that little description doesn’t really convey the awesomeness that IS Doctor Who, but really it’s just too difficult to explain the brilliance that is this show that’s been running since 1963 (with a break from 1989 to 2005), so you’ll just have to take my word for it and check it out!

Now, you might be asking yourself what in the world does a British television show have to do with HP? Well I’ll tell you, but first a bit of context. You see, the TARDIS used to be able to camouflage itself to blend in with its surroundings.  Basically, it didn’t always look like a blue police box, but somewhere along the line, likely during a visit to 1960s Britain, its chameleon circuit stuck (the thing that allowed it to blend in), and now it permanently looks like a police box. Police boxes were real things in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, because “bobbies” didn’t have personal radios on them, so they could use the police boxes to call in to the station, or pop in out of the rain to get dry, or for any other number of reasons. With the advent of personal radios for police officers, Police Boxes became a thing of the past, but there are still a few left and they have become synonymous with the TARDIS and Doctor Who.  And now for the Preservation link!  The most famous “TARDIS” that’s still standing is located in Somerton, Newport, England and it looked like this:

Photo by: Chuck Foster

As you can see it was in VERY rough shape in 2009, suffering from rot that caused almost total structural failure and what the Brits call Concrete Cancer. But because of the love Brits have not only for Doctor Who, but also for Preservation, the Somerton TARDIS received several Preservation grants and was restored in 2010.  (Believe it or not this is actually a listed structure Grade II on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest… their list is a bit different from our National Register, but that’s a post for a different time) Check out the Final Results below:

Photo By: Dave Edwards.

  Beautious, huh?

After all the horror stories we Preservationists find in pop-culture perpetrating myths about how ridiculous we seem to be (but aren’t really) it’s nice to occasionally see the media HELPING our cause.

For more in-depth articles on the story of the Somerton TARDIS, check out this site for the efforts to save it, and this site here for the story of the grant that saved the TARDIS.

Hope you all enjoyed this TARDIS’ story as much as I did.

-Etta

Oh and a BIG thanks to Chuck Foster and his friend Dave Edwards for their Great TARDIS photos and my apologies for neglecting to mention them at first posting.