NEWSVIEW: Time travellers are all well and good, but who is going to pay the ground rent? Boxing clever for the title

They belong to an entirely different era of policing, representing a symbol of lost security and co-operative communications in the sadly vanished days of beat patrols, personal approach, and community support for the local bobby.

Strategic outposts of the local police station, they extended a line of contact for officers and public alike. The emergency 999 call first threatened them. Then the ``panda'' car, along with radio communications and the almost universal introduction of the telephone into every household.

If they are used at all any more it is as bothies for traffic wardens to hang a coat and boil a kettle, or as convenient hoardings for fly posters. Police boxes have had their day.

A brilliant strategy was hatched last year by the Lothian Police Board. It was simple. Cities had been trying to get rid of their police boxes since the 1970s. Yet nobody had thought of just selling them. That was Edinburgh's idea. Through Lothian region's property services department they put an initial 36 on the market.

A bold advertising campaign had them in the ``For Sale'' columns as far afield as the New York Times. Inquiries were returning from all parts of the country, from Canada, and the United States. A big novelty attraction was under way, with a special slant. Police boxes have popular culture appeal.

Inevitably, the Doctor Who Appreciation Society got in touch, and it was about then that the first minor snag was experienced.

They were the wrong kind of police boxes. What the market demanded was a Tardis, the Time And Relative Dimension In Space vehicle from the legendary television serial that could wheech a buyer off into different temporal and spatial planes, or at least a decent replica.

What Edinburgh had to offer was something else, bigger and more rectangular. It was grander, posher, but it was the wrong design.

The reason for this can be traced back to the imagination and strong sense of civic responsibility of the late Ebenezer J Macrae. As City Architect for twenty years from 1925, he was at the height of his career when legislation required cities to equip themselves with police boxes.

There was a standard design available from the General Post Office. It was adopted by London, Glasgow, and most British cities. It would become the Tardis, courtesy of BBC cheapskating for Doctor Who when they raided the Z Cars props department. A wooden replica was what the doctor got for his time and space machine.

Ebenezer J Macrae could not have anticipated this. Back in 1930, his view was simply that Edinburgh's illustrious architectural heritage demanded something better than a standard GPO issue. He proceeded to design his own.

It had pilasters and open pediments with ribboned wreaths as a classical reference. The windows were protected and strengthened with saltire crossbars featuring decorative hubs. Each bore Edinburgh's coat of arms. An altogether superior production, it was a police box to complement the Georgian New Town. But it was no Tardis.

THIS was a setback for the marketing campaign of last year, but it was not the end of the world. Undaunted, the advertising stressed the uniqueness of the available boxes. Lothian and Borders Police issued a press release in which Chief Constable Sir William Sutherland was quoted airing an opinion that his job-lot of boxes were ``a cut above those in other cities''.

He speculated that Scots abroad or tourist visitors might like to ``buy a little bit of Edinburgh''.

The same release gave some helpful suggestions for what prospective bidders might like to do with their police box when they got it home.

``Pundits have speculated that the boxes could be used as elegant garden sheds, gatehouses, workshops, playhouses for children, or simply as a quiet hideaway.''

If this betrayed a slight nervousness about the market, matters suddenly got a lot worse. Something may have been overlooked. It was pointed out that quite a few of Edinburgh's police boxes were listed structures. These police kiosks, as the conservationists prefer to designate them, were no less than B-listed items of street furniture.

The ``elegant garden shed'' strategy might require to be revised. All but seven of the tranche of available police boxes would have to be sold in situ. You could buy one. But it was staying put.

This nevertheless turned out to be a commercially attractive proposition. When tenders closed in November the marketing exercise could be declared an unqualfied success. One was wanted as a tourist information sub-office. Another was being bought for #1650 by the departing Lothian Region to hand over for a peppercorn rent to the Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust as a ``street-side information pavilion''.

The Elephant House cafe in George IV Bridge bid #2000 for the Marshall Street police box to convert into a cappuccino hut, and Glasgow property leasing company Regis and Regis tendered for the rest to rent out to clients as commercial kiosks, agreeing to take the seven police boxes to be uplifted as part of an estimated #50,000 deal.

Suitably encouraged, a list of a further 21 police boxes was earmarked as a second group for sale. But since November, a series of yet more unforeseen problems have kept the lawyers of vendors and buyers in furious discussion. The first obstacle was ground lease.

Despite a simple tender document, the legal sub-text was that if they were to remain in situ, as both parties now preferred, the buyer might have his police box, but he did not have the 6ft 6ins x 4ft 6ins bit of pavement or street on which it stood.

Agreeing appropriate ground lease might have been simple enough, were it not for the reservations of the transport department people. What if they wanted to re-develop that part of the city, revise the pavement layout, or drive a dual carriageway through a privately-owned police box?

``The major complication is that they haven't done anything apart from sending a few letters to delay things until April, and pass the problem on to someone else,'' commented Mr Bill Leggate Samuel, managing director of Regis and Regis, who had given up on any legal breakthrough on the 25 boxes he is ready to lease until the creation of the new City of Edinburgh Council - as of today.

``We need some leeway, and a little more commercial awareness. If they can't deliver, things might get a bit heated. We own the boxes but we still don't know their terms.''

It was Lothian Region's terms that began to alarm Mr Iain Fraser, owner of the Elephant House. He found himself being asked to agree a 28-day removal notice, giving the lcoal authority the right to serve notice of redevelopments with a requirement on him to remove his proposed capuccino hut.

``It's an impasse. The whole thing has been much more complicated than I expected and I'm losing enthusiasm to be honest.'' He withheld his cheque in January, pending legal discussions.

Confronting the new City of Edinburgh Council is an expectation on the part of the prospective buyers of an extended ground lease with adequate compensation or buyout clauses. Six files on the police box ``case'' have been inherited.

``There are a few loose ends to be tied up,'' is the optimistic word from the new City Development Department. Requests for information were declined after the official consulted with staff previously involved in the complicated transactions.

Lothian and Borders Police property manager, Mr Paddy Griffiths, said there was no immediate plan to put a second tranche of police boxes before the Police Board for approval to put on the market. He hoped this might follow within the next year.

BYwhich time they may also have sorted out the conservation guidelines. A further hurdle for commercial use of the boxes has arisen in restrictions issued as a parting shot by the outgoing Edinburgh District planning department.

It wanted to protect the ``character and appearance'' of the police boxes. No fixed canopies. No superimposed fascias. Signage to consist of painted lettering in classical typeface. The list is extensive and specific. Polka dots or stripes will not be welcomed as change of colours for the boxes. Ironically, the Lothian and Borders Police require new owners to alter the traditional blue-grey uniform of boxes in official use.

But the guidelines require boxes to be painted in a single colour. Colours are restricted to ``a range of rich dark colours''. Brown is cited as an example of a rich dark colour. So are red, blue, green, and grey. It is a sober range of colours permitted for a change of paint on front doors in the New Town.

``I wanted to use the corporate colours of the Elephant House, which are a tasteful terracotta and cream,'' sighed Mr Fraser.

``We'd been fooling around with ideas for a name - the Cappuccino Cop Shop or Elephant Express. The plan is to turn the box into an up-market, continental style of street kiosk selling good coffee, pastries, croissants, small cakes. Like a Milan or Paris kiosque, or an Expresso Kart on the west coast of the United States. But I'm still awaiting the result of negotiation between my lawyers and the council's lawyers.''

Blame it all on Ebenezer J Macrae. He did too good a job with the design. If he had been content to accept the GPO standard issue none of these problems would have arisen. Edinburgh could have shipped off its police boxes to the Tardis hunters at a handy profit.

What the City of Edinburgh Council appears to have inherited is a neo-Georgian bureaucratic nightmare. It is enough to set the sirens off on every B-listed police box in the city.