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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Budding Writers -> 
London red
    2016-12-21  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    To be honest, I deeply feel that I am in London only when I see the wonderful combination of redness — red phone boxes opposite to the London Eye, red pillar boxes along the Thames river and red double-decker buses running on the Westminster Bridge. Such a strong exotic and quintessentially British scenery can always be seen in movies, posters and tourist souvenirs before I came to study in London.

    During the past one and a half years, I have fallen in love with the “redness” of London gradually. Since London is no longer a tourist city for me, I start to reinterpret this vibrant, expressive and dramatic color and want to learn the culture and history behind it.

    What impressed me most is London’s red double-decker bus. As we all know, it is an iconic symbol of the transport network which carries 6.5 million people a day. Most of the buses today are colored in Pantone Red 485 C, which is easy to spot. However, they used to be painted in different colors to signify their route until one company named LGOC painted their fleet of buses red in order to stand out from the competition.

    Coming from the same school of design as red buses, red phone boxes and red pillar boxes are also regarded as phenomenally successful examples of “branding.” The paint color, used most widely today on phone boxes and pillar boxes, is known as “currant red.”

    At first, I was surprised that the number of phone boxes in the United Kingdom is still surprisingly high although they are no longer everyday necessities nowadays. However, my British friends told me that those red boxes are far from useless since they are strongly in British people’s memories.

    Indeed, I try to imagine what if smart phones and Internet were not widely used nowadays, how many Londoners would queue for a phone box that provides each one a bit of privacy in a small space outside and how many of them would wait anxiously for a letter from remote relatives in front of a pillar box. Then, I understand that British people saw their worth — not only as a beautiful and functional structure, but also as a repository of memories.

    Jonathan Glancey, writer and author of “Pillar Boxes,” sees these red boxes as a “glorious piece of public design,” both functional and aesthetic. These miniature works of red architecture have stood the test of time and will be widely recognized as British cultural icons.

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