IN October of last year, campaigners from Aviemore Community Council won a famous victory when they persuaded BT to retain the highest telephone box in the British Isles, some 2000 feet above sea level on Cairngorm. They fought plans to remove the little-used traditional red kiosk – the scarlet-painted K2 design created by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924 – on safety grounds, arguing that although the mobile signal in the area is good, not everyone has a mobile phone. BT may have acquiesced, but it was surely for public relations rather than on any sound business or even safety grounds. The presence of the box, just by the base station for the funicular railway the skiers use, is more of a landmark than a significant part of our 21st century communication network, and it is reasonable to speculate that there would have been less of an outcry about its proposed removal if it had earlier been replaced by one of the more modern designs of kiosk to be found in our city centres.

The K2 phone box, like the Dr Who's Tardis-style police box, or the red pillar-box for Royal Mail collections, are parts of the familiar street furniture of the United Kingdom which everyone instantly recognises, but they are part of a much wider landscape that is the particular sphere of study of Dr Eleanor Herring, a lecturer in design history at Glasgow School of Art, whose first published article, in 2004, was headlined "Who turned all the fountains off?" Her new book, Street Furniture Design (Bloomsbury, £60) is subtitled "Contesting Modernism in Post-War Britain" and it tells the story of how government at a national and local level sought to remake the look of the country in the 1950s and 1960s just as it remade the lives of the population through the creation of the National Health Service, the beginnings of mass home-ownership and reform of the education system to give access to all. It was a controversial process that courted opposition from the great and the good of society in much the same way as the Prince of Wales has railed against architectural "carbuncles" more recently, and sent august professional bodies into separate camps. On occasion it even forced ordinary citizens to chain themselves to well-loved streetlamp standards threatened with replacement.

"There was a Utopian spirit then," says Herring, "a post-war ethic that we don't have anymore, when people in government felt they had an opportunity to make the country more beautiful."

She has done an enormous amount of research to uncover the story of objects that most of us walk past without a second glance. But, as the story of the Cairngorm phone box illustrates, it would still be a mistake to think that no-one in modern Britain cares. All over the country red K2 boxes have been "adopted" by the communities in which they stand, ensuring that they are kept clean and working – sometimes even regularly treated to vase of cut flowers, and saved from any attempt to remove them. Think too of the outcry in Edinburgh when vast wheelie bins were installed in parking places on residential streets. And when a vintage cast-iron electrical junction box in the West End of Glasgow was replaced by workmen, it was saved by a local resident and donated to the Cottier arts venue and has a new home in its courtyard an objet d'art.

As a student of design, Herring became fascinated by the question of the look of the things in our public realm and who had made the contemporary streetscape appear as it does.

"Someone had made a decision about how these things look, but this stuff was often designed by people who were not 'designers'," she says, adding they may not even have thought of what they were doing as designing, far less have any qualifications that identified them as such.

"Manufacturers built relationships with local authorities who had an obligation to go for the cheapest option. Concrete was hated at the time, but it was often used because steel was too expensive and difficult to get. Often the important factor was economy, not taste, so to talk now of a style of 'modernism' is to raise indulgent questions. Some things are beautiful, but some are really ugly."

Herring's book is full of illustrations of her point, of lamp-standards and bandstands, benches and bus-shelters, both attractive and ridiculous. But – after much debate – the cover shows a parking meter, in a classic design by Kenneth Grange, whose industrial design work has also included food mixers, cameras and taxis. No object, now superceded by a variety of very different ways of charging car-owners for abandoning their vehicles, could more precisely sum up the era on which she has concentrated.

Two films from 1967 featured the parking meter in a major role. At the opening of Cool Hand Luke, war veteran Paul Newman decapitates a row of meters, the crime for which he is sentenced to two years in a Florida penitentiary where his refusal to kow-tow is the engine of the movie. Back in Blighty in the same year, Stanley Donen's comic retelling of the Faust story, Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, featured a key scene where Cook (as the Devil) snaps his fingers to change a street of meters into Excess charge, incurring fines for all the drivers. It was also fifty years ago that The Beatles sang of Lovely Rita, Meter Maid on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Street Furniture Design includes a photograph from a Country Life magazine photo shoot from 1960 with an up-to-the-minute suited model feeding her sixpence into the meter. The symbolism of the simple piece of street furniture could not be clearer, with the meter going from encapsulating contemporary city life at the start of the decade, to becoming an object representing authority to be rejected in the same era's revolutionary days.

"For many of the authorities concerned," says Herring, "including central government and the Council for Industrial Design [later to become the Design Council], ensuring that street furniture looked 'modern' was essential to educating the public on good design and raising standards of public taste."

There was resistance. In Highgate in London in 1953, Lady Ritson complained that new concrete neon lighting was "needlessly grotesque."

"The design is poor, the colour ugly, and the light they throw is atrocious ... a grave defect in a village frequented by courting couples," she wrote. In Norwich five years later, a council meeting that Alan Partridge would surely have loved heard a presentation about the effect of different types of street lighting on lipstick and other facial cosmetics. In 1956 sculptor Arnold Machin had his wife chain him to a Victorian gas lamp post as he campaigned to save it from replacement with a concrete electric lamp post. Despite declaiming John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture at the authorities, he lost the battle, although some years later the estate of Victorian homes in Stoke-on-Trent was declared a conservation zone and the concrete lamp posts replaced by replica cast iron ones.

Herring has dug hard through old newspaper files, correspondence in trade magazines and the Industrial Design archive in Brighton for much of this material, and spoken to designers like Kenneth Grange herself. Although those with self-proclaimed high aesthetic standards like poet John Betjeman were not slow to share their opinions at the time, most records of design decisions have been destroyed by bodies who had nowhere to store the paperwork. None of the two dozen local authorities she contacted had kept minutes of the meetings where the appearance of their districts were decided. Of the manufacturers, CU Phosco of Ware in Herts, previously known as Concrete Utilities, is proud enough of its heritage (which dates back to 1923) to have an outdoor exhibition of its lampposts. But Broxap, whose street furniture is recognisably popular across Scotland, declined to discuss its litter bins "for security reasons". But if Herring chose a hard row to hoe, the methodology forced upon her has undoubtedly produced a more fascinating book.

"It became less about the objects themselves and more about how we talk about them," she says. Looking into what has raised hackles has revealed truths about class structure, politics and power.

"Street furniture emerged as particularly divisive subject in post-war Britain, drawing strong feelings across the country's social, political and cultural spectrum. And although I've focused on a particular period in British history, the questions of who street furniture is for, what it means and how it is used are just as relevant today as they were in the past.

"They are things that are designed to be seen, but also to be invisible. And that gets to the heart of why people care, I think."

Eleanor Herring's Street Furniture Design, Contesting Modernism in Post-War Britain is published by Bloomsbury at £60.