Two hundred new lamps will be fitted by the end of February.
For the residents of Cooper’s Yard, a narrow lane that runs from the cathedral close down to the canal towpath, the walk home after dark has for years meant switching on a phone torch and hoping for the best. The single lamp halfway along has flickered since before anyone can remember, and the stretch nearest the water has no light at all. That is about to change.
City Hall confirmed on Monday that 200 new street lamps will be installed across the old town by the end of February, after a two-year campaign led by a residents’ group that began with a handful of neighbours and a clipboard. The work, costing £1.3 million, will cover 34 streets, lanes and passages, most of them in the tangle of alleys between Market Street and the canal.
A survey on foot
The campaign started after a woman was injured falling down the unlit steps at the end of Chandler’s Passage two winters ago. Her neighbour, Delphine Ashworth, a retired surveyor, decided to find out how many other places were in the same state. Over three months, she and eleven volunteers walked every public lane in the old town after dark with a light meter borrowed from a photography club, noting each broken, dim or missing lamp.
Their report, 46 pages long and illustrated with photographs taken at midnight, found that 27 per cent of lamps in the area were either not working or produced less than half the light required by the city’s own standard. It also found that the worst-lit routes were the ones most used by shift workers walking between the hospital, the bus station and the terraced streets near the canal.
“We did not go to the council with complaints. We went with a map, a spreadsheet and a photograph of every lamp. It is much harder to say no to that.”
Ashworth, who now chairs the Old Town Lights group, said the turning point came when the group presented its findings to the council’s scrutiny committee last spring and a councillor asked officers whether they had ever carried out a similar survey. They had not.
Heritage lamps, modern light
The new lamps will be warm-white LEDs set inside replica cast-iron lanterns, designed to match the Victorian fittings that still survive on a few streets around the cathedral. The council’s heritage officer insisted on the design after an early proposal for modern steel columns met strong objections. The lights will be dimmed to half power between 1am and 5am on residential lanes but will stay at full brightness on routes to the hospital and bus station.
Astronomers and wildlife groups were also consulted. The new fittings direct light downwards, with shields to stop it spilling into bedroom windows or over the canal, where bats feed on summer evenings. A stretch of towpath beyond the last lock will remain unlit at night to protect a roost.
The money comes from the city’s capital budget for highways, topped up by £240,000 from a road safety fund. Councillor Thea Morland, who sits on the scrutiny committee and first raised the residents’ report with officers, said the new lamps would also cut the area’s lighting bill by around 60 per cent compared with the old sodium fittings, paying back much of the cost within twelve years. Maintenance will move to a new contract with a target of repairing any failed lamp within five working days.
Work will begin next week on Cooper’s Yard and Chandler’s Passage, followed by the lanes around the covered market in January. Contractors will work between 9am and 4pm to limit disruption, and some lanes will be closed to pedestrians for a day at a time. The council has promised to publish a weekly schedule on its website.
For Ashworth, the victory is welcome but not the end. The group has already started a second survey, this time of pavements. “The light will show people exactly where the potholes are,” she said. “That seems like the obvious next step.”
