London, in a different light
It was specially designed never to be noticed. And now it's disappearing, nobody has noticed its absence. It's London's own bespoke street light.
London is known for world-leading transport design: architecture, typefaces, the Routemaster Bus. But this week, vans with flashing amber lights are parked on the A501 Marylebone Road while workers dismantle an example of London’s design heritage, and I have the nagging feeling that in a city of nine million people I might be the only one who is noticing its loss.
It’s not the oxblood bricks of a Yerkes-era tube station or a green-painted cabbie’s shelter. It’s something that probably nobody will miss.
They’re replacing the street lights.
You might find little worth saving in the old street lights that are coming down. You might reasonably look at the new ones and wonder if there’s any difference: they’re about the same height, painted the same colour, made of the same material, doing the same job. Nobody looks at street lights anyway, do they? But the old ones being carted off for scrap are surviving examples of something that was once ubiquitous: London’s own bespoke street light.
Bespoke? Yes, seemingly so. More on that in a moment.
The lights being removed from Marylebone Road are about 58 years old. They were installed as part of widening work that created the present three-lane dual carriageway in the late 1960s1. The steelwork is what we’re interested in, and that’s what is pushing 60: the actual lamps will have been replaced two or three times by now and the current ones appear to date from the 1990s2.
The new and the modern
The dualling project was the work of the Greater London Council, the first government body to have responsibility for London as we now know it. It existed from 1965 to 1986.
One of its early obsessions was unifying the newly-created Greater London and its 32 brand new boroughs, and modernising a city that still bore scars from the Second World War. In an era that embraced modernity and progress, everything the GLC hoped to do was modern and progressive. Their determination was clear from the first day of the council’s existence, 1 April 1965, when they unveiled plans for an urban motorway network to solve the city’s traffic problem - a scheme of unprecedented scale and cost that would have replanned London for the modern era3.
When the GLC dualled Marylebone Road, they weren’t just widening it. They wanted to make it safe and efficient by introducing discipline. Unlike the road it replaced, it had a consistent number of lanes throughout, and those lanes were of uniform width with uniform markings. Its interaction with side streets was rationalised. Its junctions were replanned, equipped with pedestrian crossings and barriers and turning lanes and coordinated signal sequences. Bus bays were carved out, taxi ranks were formalised, parking and loading restrictions were applied. These things brought orderliness of a kind we now take for granted, but in the 1960s this had to be created, bit by bit.
The modernised road got new street furniture: pedestrian railings, European-style Worboys road signs, and yes, street lights. And everything was consciously a statement of the new and the modern, right down to the tubular steel lighting columns with unadorned brackets.
To understand why that mattered, you have to understand how most of the UK’s roads were illuminated sixty years ago.
A lot of street lighting stock dated from before the war, and was either florid cast iron, now often ageing and rusting, or chunky concrete. Even concrete lights installed since the war seemed to be suffering a hangover from the Art Deco movement. Street lighting was mostly old-fashioned.
The new GLC was responsible for London’s main routes, the “Metropolitan Roads” that would be seen and used by the greatest number of Londoners and visitors. It chose a new house style for lighting that reflected the impression it now wished to create: tubular steel columns, four inches in diameter, with the outreach bracket appearing out of the top of the column and then bending over, three degrees from the horizontal.
Steel street lighting was in its infancy at this stage; manufacturers started offering designs in the 1950s but most councils still preferred concrete. Today virtually every street in the UK has lights on tubular steel poles, but in 1965 they were rather strikingly novel.
Today, antique lights might have considerable value, but that was not the way of the 1960s. The GLC’s preferred type was deliberately different. It would be at home anywhere in the varied landscapes of London; simple enough to calm the clutter of city streets, robust enough to survive an urban motorway. It wouldn’t call attention to itself but, if you happened to notice it, would gesture towards London’s bright future and not its sooty bomb-scarred past.
A new look for London
Once you know that this was the GLC’s house style, you suddenly see it everywhere. The Westway had them, of course, until its lights were taken down in about 2008, as did the West Cross Route before it was rebuilt in the late 1990s. The Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout still has a few survivors4.
You’ll find them on the A2 Bricklayer’s Arms Flyover and the A316 Country Way.
You’ll find them on the A40 at Greenford. That was never a GLC road, but the GLC was contracted by the Ministry of Transport to design and build the flyover, so of course they installed their preferred style of lighting.
You’ll find them on the A4 Great West Road west of Hammersmith, but only in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. Where the road crosses into Hounslow the GLC’s responsibility ended, and the change in lighting columns still marks an administrative boundary that ceased to exist in 1986.
And until not so long ago, you’d have seen them on the A2 Rochester Way Relief Road, and the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach, and the underpass at Wandsworth.
This could have just been a council choosing what equipment to buy. But there’s evidence it was much more than that.
An eye for detail
The GLC’s interest in design was on a scale rarely found today. Take, for example, the construction of the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach (BTNA), now the A12 between Blackwall and Hackney Wick, where the GLC’s Department of Architecture and Civic Design5 issued detailed drawings showing how every road sign should be mounted and illuminated, and how each lighting column should look6.
Each lighting column, as you will fully expect, had to be tubular steel, four inches diameter, with an outreach bracket three degrees above the horizontal.
Lighting columns of this design aren’t unusual - you’ll find them nationwide. They don’t seem to be manufactured any more, but from the 1970s to the early 2000s they were widely used by councils across the land. Some London boroughs adopted them - Bromley and Tower Hamlets, for example, where many are still in use. They even appeared on trunk road projects; the M1 between the M62 and A1, opened in 1999, used them throughout.
But the GLC was sticking them on the Marylebone Road in 1967, which seems to be earlier than anyone else. And there seems to be a reason for that.
The Design Council’s catalogue of street furniture from 1974/75 includes a picture of GLC lighting columns on the Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach, and describes them like this7.
Tubular steel column with tubular steel bracket of standard profile and 3º inclination, designed for use on Metropolitan roads.
Mounting height 10m-15m.
Designers: Road Trim Design Group, Greater London Council.
The GLC didn’t just care enough about fine details like these that they had a Department of Architecture and Civic Design. They cared enough to also convene a Road Trim Design Group. And their Road Trim Design Group cared enough about presenting a clean, modern, progressive appearance in every aspect of their work that they looked at what commercial manufacturers were offering, found none of it to their taste, and commissioned their own street light specifically for London.
The GLC light column was then deployed across the city, one small detail in the overall project to unify and modernise London in everything the bold new council did. Having designed them in the mid-1960s, the GLC faithfully continued installing them through to its demise in 1986: the A2 Rochester Way Relief Road, for example, opened in 1982, used nothing else.
Transport for London are rightly feted for some of the design work they and their predecessors have gifted to London and indeed to the nation. Their attention to detail when it comes to typography, ceramic tiling on tube platforms or the patterns on seat fabric is legendary. But even TfL don’t much mind what street lights look like. The new lights they putting up are very ordinary off-the-shelf posts of the most basic type.
Ironically, one of the reasons you might look at the new lights and see little difference is that the GLC’s lights - their custom-designed lights, intended to be so different in their simplicity and modernity - were doing something that everybody else would eventually end up doing too. They pioneered the very thing that became mundane.
The rest of the world has caught up; the Marylebone Road’s new lights look little different to the old precisely because today’s most ordinary off-the-shelf posts of the most basic type are tubular steel. And now every street has them, it’s hard to even understand how distinctive these designs were.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that, in a city of nine million people, nobody else is noticing the loss of the old lights on the Marylebone Road. They were designed not to call attention to themselves and so, as they depart, they receive no attention.
But still, it seems appropriate to note that what we are losing is London’s own street light, a carefully considered gift from an organisation that seemed to care deeply about the impression they created even where nobody would notice, and a design that spread nationwide because it was so functional, durable and successful.
A new home for Roads.org.uk blog posts
I should mention the fact that you’re reading this on Substack and not on Roads.org.uk where my blog posts used to live.
The website is still there and still active - all the things you always used to find there are still online and still being updated. The only thing that’s changing is that my blog posts are now arriving on Substack. The website will still list them, and they’ll still appear on the homepage, but you’ll be able to read them here, or - by subscribing - in your inbox.
Posting on Substack will help me connect to other writers and reach more people. It will also allow you to sign up and never miss when I (erratically) publish something new. I’d be really grateful if you’d subscribe and, if you like what I do, share it with others.
Picture credits
Archive photograph of North Circular Road at Green Lanes is used under licence from London Metropolitan Archives, City of London (Collage record number 248773).
Reconstruction of the A3 in 1967 is from GLC/TD/C/21/002.
Football match under the Westway is from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Library Time Machine.
Work finished in 1968; nearly a mile and a half of Central London street was widened to provide six traffic lanes for less than a million pounds. Bargain!
Nobody much writes about street lighting, but even those who do are usually interested in the lanterns. This blog is specifically about the posts. It’s like I’m wilfully trying to alienate as many readers as possible.
If you’ve read any of my stuff before you will know that I’ve been researching and writing about the Ringways for 20 years and I’m not done yet, but this is a rare example of a blog post that’s about something else the GLC did.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Libraries have several great blog posts sharing pictures of the brand new Westway from their archives - this one is a great starting point.
Pause, just for a moment, to try and wrap your head around a world where a local authority could even contemplate the idea of running a Department of Architecture and Civic Design.
BTNA plans are sourced from GLC/TD/PM/CDO/07-335.
This is all thanks to the brilliant LCC Municipal on BlueSky, who even posted pictures from the book.
Great article - absolutely fascinating stuff. It would be interesting to know why some of these lamp columns have lasted so well (Marylebone Road) whilst others have lasted so badly (the A2 Rochester Way Relied Road with its "intermittent street lighting" springs to mind). Was there one design with many different suppliers, or different grades of steel used over the years.
Once again, great article - I think you might have opened up a whole can of worms here.
As soon as I saw this article I thought about the lighting column in the disused road that would have been part of the junction for the Thames Gateway Bridge (see https://maps.app.goo.gl/bXb5LoP78YJKaveV8). Is this the same type? If so, this may outlive all the lighting columns on the active road network!