Shoppers may have thought The Doctor had taken up residence in Kent after they spotted his iconic time-travel machine.

The recreation of the Tardis has been crocheted by yarn and haberdashery shop Unravel and Unwind CIC and installed at the Medway Art Box, an old BT phone box repurposed as a mini gallery, in Rochester High Street.

Director Faye Lamb said the community interest company was approached by the team at Nucleus Arts, which runs the neighbouring cafe, to see if they wanted to design a project to go on show at the small gallery.

She said: “As it was a phone box, I thought we could create the Tardis which I have always wanted to do. I just thought it would be a cool idea and the opportunity arose.”

This year is the 60th anniversary of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who and special episodes are showing next month, so it was the perfect timing for the installation, Faye added.

The craft group at the store, in Green Street, Gillingham, started planning the design in May and began crocheting in June, every other week for two hours.

It took 20 people, 48 balls of chunky yarn and around four months to create the blue police box.

The project was sponsored by Emu Yarns, in Sittingbourne, which donated the coloured yarn for the main part of the Tardis.

Faye added: “We have never done anything like this or on this scale before but it has inspired us to do more.

“We have always been community based and it is important to us to host activities like the yarn bomb group. We are not just a shop and our local crafters are as important to us.”

The Tardis has been on show throughout October and will be removed later this week but will then be displayed at the yarn shop in Gillingham.

Creating knitted works of art is growing in popularity among Kent’s crafters.

In the summer, Disney fan Sarah Simpson was compared to Banksy by neighbours for her miniature version of the famous balloon house from the film Up.

The masterpiece adorned a postbox in Kings Hill and took about a week to complete including a crocheted version of owner Carl Fredricksen.

“If you are a Disney fan, you instantly know what the house looks like and how much it resonates with people,” the 37-year-old stay-at-home mum said. “I thought, it would look so cute on a postbox as it would look like it is floating.”

In Istead Rise, near Gravesend, the Women’s Institute creates knitted postbox toppers to celebrate all occasions and seasons – including the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee last year.

Their royal-inspired work featured a red, white and blue tree which had around 100 individual knitted leaves sewn on, the Queen, a guardsman and three corgies, and took months to make.

This month, postboxes around Meopham have been adorned with tractors ploughing the fields, Halloween witches and spiders, Remembrance poppies and a scarecrow in a field of pumpkins.