TardisWhen I first went to Scarborough on the East Yorkshire coast, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a Tardis on the footpath! I half expected the Doctor (played by Tom Baker of course) to appear and beckon me with a wink and waggle of his finger to join him on his inter-galactic adventures through time and space.

The new series of Doctor Who has introduced the franchise to a lot of new viewers in the United States but those of us in the Anglophile world - in my case, Australia in the 1970s and 1980s - grew up with it. I remember thrilling to the theme music and cowering behind the couch during the scary bits. The big boys at school (who were an ancient seven to my five years old) would play Daleks in the playground, intoning “I will ex-ter-min-ate you” in a robotic voice, with their arms outstretched to make a Dalek gun. Peter Davison, the blond one, was the doctor by the 1980s but we saw the curly-haired, tweed-scarved Tom Baker often enough on repeats and he was definitely my favourite.

Yet to Britons, particularly those from the older generation, this is a perfectly ordinary police box, a remnant from an earlier age when the police on the beat would have to call back to the station at regular intervals. This page dedicated to police boxes says they were introduced in 1888, widespread by 1937 and ditched in favour of walkie-talkies in 1967. When Doctor Who first started, in the 1960s, the police box was quite common place, making it a good disguise for the Tardis, at least for the Earth-based episodes.

There are very few police boxes left, but they are scattered around the UK in odd places. There’s one on the seafront promenade at Scarborough. There’s another next door to the cathedral in Glasgow. There is one in Brighton that is set to be turned into a tiny student house. Presumably it’s bigger than the average police box … or maybe it’s just bigger on the inside?

If the Doctor ever did invite me to go travelling with him in his Tardis, where would I go? Well, bearing in mind that the Tardis is in a perpetual state of disrepair and the navigation usually goes wrong, my top five destinations would be:

  • The Moon, to see the Earth from Space.
  • An Earth-like planet to search for intelligent life.
  • Sydney in 1787 (before the arrival of Europeans).
  • London in 1600 to see a Shakespearean play at the Globe Theatre and possibly meet the playwright.
  • Ancient India at the time of the birth of Buddhism.

Actually, it’s really hard to choose just five - I would also love to go to Renaissance Florence, ancient Greece and Egypt, the Aztec Empire, and much more. I’m unsure whether I would want to visit the Earth in 50-100 years from now, to know whether things work out for my (as yet unborn) children and grandchildren.

What would your top five be? Let me know in the comments and also feel free to tell me where else you can find a Tardis police box in the UK.