This from the BBC News website has a few interesting lighting shots.

At the start are 1970s fluorescents from central London, about halfway through there is 1930s new town lighting with stay bracketed main road columns and also side road columns. Moving onto the 1960s there are some CU concretes with either Phosco or Eleco SOX lanterns.

What is also fascinating - to me at least - is seeing brand new estates of new houses all looking the same and uniform.

The uniformity when first built is quite staggering... however, had we been there at that time would we have thought it as radical or boring? The house I'm in now is a 1960's build (64) and is part of a private estate - which started at my end of the main road that the houses come off from, and worked its way northward up to the rest of the village (taking up previously empty land either side of the york to beverley rail line)... so as you go up the main road you start off with early 60's builds that gradually progress in style to late 70's builds. The next road on from me has houses that have the exact same plan layout and size, but the frontage includes wood cladding between the living room and front bedroom windows, no side raking of the roof but a flat gable end instead, and in some the chimney stack has been merged so both houses on each side of the partition share the stack (whereas the older 60's have individual single-flue chimneys per house, going right up the centre of the house)... these look less uniform that the earlier 60's builds, but after 40 years of use they do look a bit more scruffy than the earlier 60's builds. Another thing to note is garden size... our garden has enough length for a 4m kitchen extension, full length garage with work area at the end and a seperate office/store room and then a 4m long shed - but the houses behind us are 70's builds and those gardens are just long enough for a prefab concrete garage with a bit of room for a 2 or 3m shed behind it... and as you shift forward through the years, the gardens shrink in size as developers try to squeeze more properties into ever-smaller plots of land.
In terms of lighting, the original columns were Stanton 7's with swan necks fitted, placed at junctions, corners, and in the middle of a long gap between junctions. I cannot confirm the lantern type originally used (though one street with late 60's bungalows has GEC Z5560's fitted to the swan necks) as all the old columns on my street have been sleeved, but I believe they may have been either open mercury lanterns like the Eleco Welwyn / GEC Z5355, or earlier enclosed mercury lanterns like the Eleco Ware. The column spacing has been altered since as infill columns have appeared between the previous gaps.

The 1950's houses shown with wooden fronts and metal windows still look unusual even today (there's a few dotted around York) but parts of them haven't stood up well against old father time.

For those who don't know, the building at 5 minutes in (that looks like an upside-down Playstation 2) is Beetham Tower in Manchester city centre (Deansgate)

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In my home town of Thornton Cleveleys you can trace the age of any post-war housing estate by the columns used:

Late 40s to early 50s - Stanton 7B (original type)
Mid 50s to mid 60s - Stanton 7B (slimline type)
Late 60s to mid 70s - Stanton 10
Late 70s to mid 90s - Stanton 1805CS
Late 90s to mid 2000s - Stainton tubulars (painted black)
Mid 2000s to now - Stainton tubulars (galvanised/unpainted)

Some 1930s areas used to have CU Avenue columns but these were replaced, mostly in the late 80s, by CU Byway X's. It seems my local council used concrete columns from pretty much the beginning of their production until the end of it. The only columns that remain unsleeved are those from the early 90s onwards.

The discussion about GRP columns has been moved to a more appropriate location here so that this thread can remain on topic.

Discovery of old photographs including this Flickr set, this photo and this photo have revealed more about Basingstoke new town's lighting history.

It seems that some of the oldest new town lighting consisted of 8m CU Highway X columns with Thorn Alpha 2 fluorescent lanterns, installed in the late 1960s. Following this, from the late 1960s to probably around the mid 1970s, 8m and 10m tubular steel columns were installed, and it seems that many of these were fitted with mercury-burning Thorn Alpha 3s. Roads like the ring road had Alpha 5s on the same style columns, and these were slimline bowled and possibly SLI. Meanwhile, the main road through the town centre had GEC Z8420 'turtles'.

Recent memories of Basingstoke main road lighting are of gear-shoed Philips MA90s and MA50s on 8m and 10m tubular steel columns. It appears that Basingstoke originally had a thing for main road mercury, and that by the 1980s the council decided to make energy savings by bulk replacing mercury with SOX. Meanwhile, CU Highway X columns in Basingstoke could recently be seen with gear-shoed MA90s, although on different style brackets to the fluorescents. The brackets looked to have been of the same vintage as the columns, so perhaps some concretes also had Alpha 3s.

Basingstoke may not have had the most elaborate new town lighting, but like the rest of Hampshire it was different to other towns in the county. The presence of lots of main road mercury was unusual for the county, and thanks to mass lantern replacements of the 1980s that affected the rest of Hampshire too and the current PFI, all that individuality is almost all lost now.

Although of course technically Basingstoke wasn't a new town with evidence of origins dating back as far as the 13th century and the railway arriving during the Victorian era. However the mass expansion from the mid 1960s (population doubled between 1961 and 1971) onwards, and the extensive re-development of the town centre, gives the impression of a new town.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be uploading an extensive selection of photos of the lighting from this town - more varied than you would expect, but now practically all replaced by the PFI.

I have managed to unearth a bit more about Basingstoke's lighting history. From the Flickr set that sotonsteve mentions is this image showing CU Highway X columns with Thorn Alpha 2s dated 1978.

Also from Flickr is this image from 1972 showing the same type of installations. Other Highway X images show the columns fitted with different brackets and MA90s. So did the columns being relatively new, get re-bracketed and re-lanterned in the 1980s?

The scene in October 2010 with late 1990s/early 2000s 8m steel columns and Sapphire 2s. These were replaced during 2011 with green SON Iridiums as part of the PFI. I suspect those steel columns replaced the CUs, but I have yet to confirm if the CUs had MA90s with new brackets on when they were replaced. Note the twin road turnings on the left and the wall on the right which align with the 1972 view - growth of the trees disguises the rest of the view.

A few weeks ago a spotted some Stanton 8 columns in Crawley. I believe they are the last of their type in the town. I had assumed they were fitted with brackets before being sleeved, but another enthusiast has provided their history:



Looking through the excellent Francis Frith site, there is this image taken just a few yards from my image circa 1960 showing the Stanton columns when new and those massive AEI fluorescent post tops. What a sight they must have been at night!

Bracknell in Berkshire which was designated a new town in 1949, is soon to have its 1960s shopping arcades demolished for redevelopment.

Vintage photos showed that it originally had similar lighting to other new towns of that era. The original lighting is all long gone.

GEC 845X series 2ft fluorescent post top lantern circa 1965 in one of the arcades to be demolished.

AEI fluorescent post tops in another part of the same arcade.

GEC Z5644 in another part of the town.

Looking at the photos in first 2 links in my previous post, they are actually exactly the same location! The give away is the shop on the right named "Whites". It can clearly be seen in the AEI picture and is just visible in the GEC picture.

Given the GEC 845X was (according to Simon Cornwell's site) available from 1964-1974, that could well be the later lantern and would tie up with "circa 1965" from the caption.

Looking at the catalogue for the AEI fluorescent:



It also shows pictures of the 5ft fluorescent version of the lantern in use in Crawley. Those images are in a part of the town built in the mid to late 1950s. It is therefore probable that the 2ft fluorescent version is of similar vintage.

This would make the image of Bracknell in the 2nd link older than the first and the caption to be wrong, with a date more likely to mid to late 1950s.