I was asked to write a personal piece for a street lighting art installation. I think Covid-19 has delayed it, but it neatly sums up my position on the current state of street lighting:
Street lighting used to be interesting.
It’s all functional and modern these days: angled LED slices mounted on grey, steel, undecorated poles. It has that whiff of uncompromising efficiency where the bottom line is king, where the light on the street is all that matters, and the daylight appearance is of secondary consideration. But there was a time when it was diverse, artistic, oddball, historical, mysterious and, indeed, interesting. And my interest in the subject was piqued by the street lighting in 1970s Beckenham.
I grew up in this London suburb and some of my formative childhood memories were the damp, foggy, Autumnal evenings. The wide, leafy main roads were lit by the eerie blue-green glow of the borough’s idiosyncratic street lighting, and in the twilight, as the mist fell and one shuffled through the leaves, the lighting gave the scene a new aesthetic. The lanterns pierced the fog like miniature eyes of Sauron, their vertical irises suspended above the roadway, floodlighting the road and pathway with an otherworldly blue glow. Colours were distorted, the hues shifted, the world now rendered in black and blue. Yet it wasn’t the oddly coloured landscape which intrigued me, but it was the streetlights themselves.
The allure of these municipal placements was not just restricted to the night, as they held an equal fascination by day. The columns were rough concrete, obliquely triangular, raising to a lattice work of vertical concrete slats, supporting a graceful arc which held the lantern aloft. The whole unit had an elegance, the vertical angular column combining with the sweep of the bracket, ultimately suspending a fragile cat’s eye luminaire over the carriageway. And they were planted with regimented care, placed in staggered formation along the straights and swung into wild arcs across the bends.
And then there were the “Butterflies”. Even at my young age, I could appreciate that these smaller units, used for the lighting of the borough’s residential side streets, were older and more antiquated than their neighbouring, brutalist main road examples. Usually installed on decorative cast-iron columns, complete with swan-neck brackets with embellishments, scrollwork and finials, these lanterns resembled the open wings of a butterfly, fitted with an integral mosaic of mirrored glass. At night, their semi-circular facetted faces gave a beautiful, warm, tungsten glow, which was entirely in keeping with the gravelled roads and 1930s mock-Tudor architecture of their surrounds. It was just so fitting.
This style and variance of street lighting was not just limited to Beckenham. Every borough in London at that time had its own individual lighting. Every local lighting engineer had his own favourites, styles and colours. The local maintenance crews made up their own vernacular, calling the lanterns “Butterflies” or “Sugar Bowls” – the original manufacturer’s names either wilfully forgotten or discarded for more natural nouns. At night, the differences were more profound with roads lit up with bold orange, zombie blue-green, warm tungsten and the harsh white of fluorescent. The whole of the UK was a patchwork of unique street lighting combinations thanks to different ideas, different styles, different materials and ancient old legal acts that allowed individual councils to conduct their own affairs.
Navigation around the various boroughs of London was easy. Just look at the streetlights. So, if the main roads were lit by tall, silver painted steel fluted columns, with simple angular brackets with a supporting flange, and a deep, angular orange lantern with a criss-cross patterning on its end faces, then you were in Croydon. Similarly, a residential road lit by silver painted “Butterflies” on large swan-neck brackets with “flower” finals, suggested you were further west in Sutton. Not only did every lighting engineer pick his own preferences of lighting equipment, but he also stipulated the colours, normally the borough’s own, adding to the diversity and interest. You could, in theory, determine the borough by the colour scheme of the streetlights alone, although that became more difficult with concrete.
My family moved from the area and all the old schemes and installations were gradually swept away. Their replacements were less interesting, more uniform, more common. But it didn’t stop me wondering about these old streetlights, the ones that so fascinated me. And so, I found out more.
Beckenham’s concrete columns and brackets, those massive monoliths which made such an impact on the road scene, despite being shielded by trees in some of the leafier streets, were the result of 1930s technology and styling. The concrete column and bracket were a new technology at that time, born in the 1920s, and they were slowly evolving into ever more graceful and slender styles. This transmutation was helped by the Fine Arts Council, who were the official government sanctioned arbiters of taste, and who passed manufacturer’s designs. The rough concrete was embellished with art-deco grooves and scallops, the column was filleted triangular in cross-section, and it tapered to accept a lattice bracket on its capital. Concepts of style and proportion were adhered to, the two parts designed as one unit. Even the names harked back to a more innocent, typically British age, with the column called the “Avenue” and the bracket dubbed the “Shakespeare”.
The pendent lanterns, suspended over the road like levitating disembodied cat’s eyes, came from another time together. These were post-war, when form followed function, embellishments were gone, and the mettle of judging taste had been passed to the no-nonsense Council of Industrial Design. This futuristic glass concoction had the wonderfully futuristic moniker of “Dioptrion”, which gave it a space-race vibe. One could imagine multiple units mounted in frames at the Festival of Britain, their beams boldly illuminating the huge elevating space needle, the brochure pointing out how the Dioptrion was illuminating the Skylon. The fact that these two components, being the concrete column and the glass lantern, straddled the war years, and arose from different design methodologies, and yet came together as a coherent whole, was fascinating.
The little side-street “Butterfly” lanterns which had also captivated me, were even more ancient, the result of experiments in optical control by the wonderfully named Lieutenant Commander Haydn T. Harrison, in 1923. His facetted mirrors covered concave reflectors, designed to redirect the limited light from the tungsten lamp onto the road surface where it was most needed. It was one of the earliest attempts at optical control, and his firm, Electrical Street Lighting Apparatus (ESLA), produced a combination of reflectors for every road alignment. There were multitudes of 2-way versions for varying angles of road, 3-way variants for T-junctions, 4-way styles for cross-roads, and rare octagonal versions for roundabouts. It was called the “Bi-Multi” system of street lighting, and versions could be found in Beckenham, Sutton, Cheam, Wimbledon and all over the UK, all mounted on differently decorated swan neck brackets, all decked out in the borough’s liveries. Beckenham had the purest examples, as the swan necks, and all their chunky 1930s embellishments were also by the same firm, fuse box covers proudly bearing the “ESLA” name, all painted in dark borough green.
Manufacturer’s names and rough installation dates offered an initial mooring point and helped to position the borough’s own street lighting history, and the history of those boroughs surrounding it. But there was also the science underpinning the construction, the optical, electrical, and mechanical engineering, which had been brought together to create these units. Going this extra step revealed more of the theory underpinning street lighting, and answered more questions concerning their design.
Reinforced concrete for columns and brackets had slowly gained in popularity since its introduction in Liverpool in 1931. The selling point was durability of the material, and the savings in maintenance, as concrete didn’t require constant repainting like its cast iron and steel counterparts. And there were extra twists to the Avenue and Shakespeare’s design which was probably not immediately apparent: the odd triangular cross-section was angled to reflect car headlights; the sweeping bracket was perfectly balanced as the back end of the elegant arch was a disguised counterweight; rebars through the concrete ensured its continuing structural stability after a collision; and the inspection cover in the base, which gave access to the lamp controlling electronics and time switch, was positioned so a workman would be facing oncoming traffic.
The oddly shaped double oval Dioptrion was a master class in optical engineering, the glass refractors forming two beams designed to obliquely strike the road surface at a shallow angle. This ensured the limited light from the fixture was used to its maximum effect and rendered the road surface bright and all obstacles upon it appeared in silhouette. This lighting technique was known as ‘silhouette vision’ or ‘negative contrast’, a concept discovered and developed in the early 1930s. The eerie blue-green light was the result of using a mercury discharge lamp, which was far more efficient than a household tungsten fitting, and colour was not considered important. (Its sister technology, the orange sodium discharge lamp, was developed at the same time, also appearing in the early 1930s, and became the mainstay of British street lighting for many years).
The Second World War was also a major contribution to Beckenham’s lighting. The combination of concrete for the columns and bracket, and glass for the lantern, harked back to necessity and austerity, and was not a cosy armchair selection made by the borough’s lighting engineer. Erected in 1951, Beckenham’s main road installation was typical of post-war requirements: concrete and glass were used because metal was in such short supply. But it made for a rugged, efficient and, in some ways, beautiful installation which was expected to last 25 years.
Most of these streetlights lasted well over 30, with the final remnants clinging on into the early 1990s. The rugged little ESLA Bi-Multis fared a little better: most were swept away in the 1970s, when the energy crisis necessitated more energy efficient lighting and the warm tungsten lamps being used were simply too costly. They were replaced by modern sodium lanterns, but some Bi-Multis clung on, still to be found on private roads in the borough, kept because the residents appreciated their looks. But they are exceedingly rare now.
In the end the vast majority of this idiosyncratic, deeply peculiar and oddball street lighting was confined to the skip: the lanterns smashed and discarded, the cast iron and steel columns melted down and recycled, the concrete cracked and reduced to hardcore and rubble. But I saved what I could: salvaging items from friendly lighting engineers, rescuing examples from demolition sites and negotiating bits and pieces from salvage yards. My back garden is now filled with a selection of “butterflies” and “sugar bowls”, a graveyard for Britain’s post-war lighting, a small history of twentieth century street lighting technology. I even have a Dioptrion – not one of Beckenham’s alas – but rescued from a car park in Worcester. It is probably my favourite lantern in the collection.
One night, when it is misty, I will fit it with a mercury lamp, fire it up and bathe in nostalgia, remembering the foggy nights of 1970s Beckenham.
Back when street lighting was interesting.
Simon Cornwell Great Chishill April 2020
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