There are cases where private roads and private property are lit with columns and lanterns installed and maintained by councils and their contractors. Below are some examples.

In Southampton there are a couple of unadopted residential streets in the city. One is lucky enough to have a tarmac road surface, the other is a dirt track. However, both have street lighting maintained by the council. In both cases there are 1920s/1930s Revo cast iron columns with swan necks at very large, quite rural spacings. One private road has AC Ford AC730 lanterns running 70W SON-E lamps, whilst the other has DW Windsor Iffley lanterns running 35W CDM-T lamps. I am not sure who exactly owns or maintains the unadopted roads, but there seems to be some form of special arrangement with the council to provide lighting.

In Hedge End there is an unadopted road in an industrial estate. The part built in the late 1980s has the same style columns as those installed elsewhere in the area at the time, namely galvanised Stainton octagonal steel columns, 5m ones with GEC 'Boats' and replacement Philips MI36s and Urbis ZX1s, and 8m ones with GEC Z9454s and Philips MA90s. The original road was accessible via an adopted section of road through a neighbouring group of industrial units, which has now been given the PFI treatment, but since completion of a new section of clearly stated unadopted private road the old access has been fully fenced off. When the new access opened it remained unlit for a few years, but recently new Hampshire green 8m Mallatite columns with CosmoArcs appeared. These are PFI-spec columns and lanterns on a road that is clearly private. Evidently the landowner of the industrial estate has some form of special deal with the council/PFI contractor.

Then there is the case of railway station forecourts. At Hedge End the car park was originally lit with typical British Rail 5m Abacus fold down columns and Urbis ZX1 and ZX2s running SON. The columns were originally Network South East red, and later painted South West Trains blue. However, following alterations to the forecourt new Abacus columns were installed. However, they were painted Hampshire green. Similarly, at Southampton Airport Parkway, the station forecourt, car parking around and access roads directly into the new station-owned multistorey car park are lit to PFI-spec. There are new Hampshire green 6m Mallatite mid-hinged columns fitted with green CosmoIridiums and CosmoArcs on what is very clearly station property. Why public road type lighting is installed rather than station type lighting I do not know, but again there appears to be some form of special arrangement.

Can anybody shed more light on the matter?

Thats happens a lot round here but mostly with dirt track type roads, however recently lots of these have been adopted had had proper surfaces laid. The lighting is usally supplied via overhead network.

My street is an example of this as each house owns the piece of road at the back of the houses,  unfortunately when we built our houses part of the land was quite a long stretch of unlit road.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Summerh ... 2,,0,12.46 a council owned Oracle now lights the road at the corner, previously a beta2 was fitted.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Shotley ... 44,,0,-9.1 this track leads to a car park and the riverside footpath a various residential properties and is lit with a combination or 55watt SOX and 70watt SON lanterns. New indirect lighting has been fitted on the approach ramps to the new footbridge.

My street use to be like this until sometime in 1993 when the entire street was surfaced and the cast iron swan necks with T/E Beta 5s were replaced with Phillips MI55s on Abacus columns painted in Calderdale's beige/light brown.

The closest private road, public lighting to me is Stoney Hill which has a T/E Beta 5 on what still is unadopted or Bowling Alley (no joke either) which is about a 3 minute walk from the centre of Rastrick (Top O Tarn) which has T/E Beta 5s but there is a couple of concrete Stantons roughly halfway along.

Booth Royd Lane in Rastrick could be a private road with public lighting as Chris has been along here to that Dioptrion.

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From streetlighting to radio, dance through the night whilst the streetlights are glowing outside.

There are a few private roads in my area. Some have no lighting at all while others have council-maintained lighting, either of the usual type or totally different to the norm.

Firstly, Holmefield Avenue and Linden Close in Cleveleys (locally known as Millionaires Row   ) are lit with typical 'Cleveleys' lighting ie Stanton 7b columns sleeved with SRL8s, however these are spaced much further apart than normal, making this area quite dark at night. These columns originally held finned brackets with Beta 4 MBF lanterns but these lasted a bit longer on these roads than in most other parts of the town and for a while I thought they wouldn't be replaced at all. They finally succumbed in 1993 iirc, some five years after most similar installations were sleeved in the town.

Nearby, is The Hermitage which is a small private estate built in the late 80s and lit with these 'heritage' columns and DW Windsor Yorks. These are quite unusual for the area which is why I think they were specified by the developer. However, due to the age of the development I find it unlikely that the developer still maintains the lighting so I think these must now be under council ownership.

Also, talking of railway station lighting comes these anomalies at Blackpool North station. The approach road is lit by three of these beauties, long-bracketed Stanton & Staveley CS1810 columns fitted with Philips MA30s. When the adjacent bypass was built at the same time as the new station in 1974 it too was lit with these. However, while the lighting on the bypass changed to MRL6s in around 1993 and more recently to PFI-spec Evolos, the MA30s on the station approach have remained as they are. They now appear to be group-switched and the council ID numbers were repainted in the typical style in the early 90s , so it appears at some point these came out of council ownership and into the railway's hands. It's a good thing too, as these would certainly be long gone by now, despite all three installations being in excellent condition (apart from the slightly twisted bracket on the pictured example).

The main example I can think of round this way is Muncastergate (also includes Templemead, Abbotsgate, and The Crossway)
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Muncast ... 26,,1,0.18

The lighting is council owned and is a mixture of wartime cast iron columns (as shown) with early 1980's Beta 5's fitted, or BS 1980's columns with the same Beta 5's fitted, with a few newer columns and WRTL 2600's or QSS's fitted. And recently a couple of the cast iron columns have white crosses on them, and so will get new columns with QSS's fitted (most likely on crook brackets).

The road itself is unadopted, and was resurfaced in the mid 1990's with poor mans road surface (ie Loose Chippings). Every Householder on the estate had to pay in a bit towards the resurfacing, which didn't come particularly cheap. When it was first done there was complaints because all that the surface had done was put gravel over top of the chipped and broken concrete slabs underneath, and the original faults and crevices of the road were still there but were not seen until people rode over them. Because traffic volumes are pretty low here, some of the road surface is still loose and never sealed down properly. The streetview picture makes the road appear smooth, but 2 hard winters since that picture has taken its toll quite badly - and the road is really in desperate need of a new proper road surface now.

There is only one entrance and exit by car to the area - the A1036 Malton Road. All other roads have been barricaded to prevent 'commoners' driving around the private patch. And it is a bit annoying when you know on a bike you can go from Dodsworth Avenue/ Fossway to the Malton Road by going along Muncastergate, but in a car you have to go right up Dodsworth Avenue and then up the A1036 to the end of Muncastergate. There was a period for a while whereby local chavs from Bellfarm/Byland Avenue had smashed a car into a bollard set at Friars Walk and had created  a hole for small cars the size of an old corsa or a mini to fit through. The council came along and made a double width concrete bollard about 1m wide.

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The first road I linked to in my post, Holmefield Avenue, also has an unadopted road surface and has a 'patchwork quilt' look to it with some bits smooth tarmac, some bits rough tarmac, some bits gravel and some bits poor-condition concrete, depending on the householders along the road. There's never been any communal effort to surface the road there. Nearby Linden Close is even worse, with some parts of the road having great big craters in. There are no pavements along any of these roads either. Although both roads could be useful throughroutes, neither are really used as such, due to their poor condition. However, I can never understand why the residents don't have these roads properly surfaced as most of their cars are very expensive types and it can't do them any good to have to drive across this rubbish every day! At least it keeps people's speed down better than any speed cushions or chicanes could!  

Certainly be a bit easier than driving over something like this everyday
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Holmefi ... 10.61&z=15

this hump is made of block paving and is 120mm high, and so is technically illegal. the tarmac has a few chasms and canyons in it from the numerous vehicle undersides that have scraped down on it over the years... and a few weeks back there was a massive trial of oil going down my road, and from tracking it back it came right to this very hump!
On my dual suspension bike it gives me a bit of a jolt - but one time my mum let me borrow her bike to get some chips (both of my bikes had died) and hers doesn't have suspension: I rode it the same way I ride mine and nearly broke my damn wrist on this hump!

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Yeah that hump does look a bit nasty. A tarmacced speed hump was recently installed on Blackpool Prom which was so steep and wide that a bus actually got grounded on it! Since then they've come back and lowered it substantially so now you can just drive over it at normal speed. What a waste of money!  

There's this road just round the corner from me called Middlefield Approach which claims to be a privately owned road but is lit with Redbridge Council's ZX1s on Fabrikat hockeysticks. It has the council's "no parking, no flytipping and CCTV in operation" signs as well. What's annoying is that for many years there were gaping great holes in the tarmac, but the council said it was the responsibility of the residents in the nearby houses to pay to fill them in. The holes were eventually filled in back in 2010 but at the resident's expense. So if it's a private road, why has the council stuck up its lamp posts and signs on it?

Reminds me of a recent trip to Liverpool, where the road around Sefton Park actually has signs up saying "unadopted road" but has municipal street lighting in use.

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