Don’t let the lamps go out in London
For centuries, they’ve cast a romantic glow over the streets that inspired Dickens and Conan Doyle. But now the capital’s exquisite gas lights are being replaced with soulless eco bulbs. Here, GRIFF RHYS JONES makes a passionate plea...
There’s an evening nip in the air in central London. Pull up the collar of your coat, listen to your footsteps clack on the flagstones and you could imagine yourself in a Dickens novel.
The scene is set, not by the joyless orange glare of the ubiquitous sodium street lamp — more reminiscent of a modern dual carriageway than Victorian London — but a gas lamp. These iron sentries, with their warm embracing glow, act as guardians of a lost age.
Their effect is a magical walk home at night, in my case after the theatre. suddenly, you are sharing a city with Oscar Wilde, or sherlock holmes
creator sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Peter Pan author James Barrie. And you realise that, despite the clamour of the here and now, we are all but visitors, passing through an enduring metropolis.
Only, Westminster Council disagrees. To its jobsworths, gas lamps are not a charming vestige of the 19th century to be cherished, but gas-guzzling monstrosities. They want to pinch the flame of all 275 gas lanterns for which the council is responsible in the heart of London.
They have a team of enthusiastic mechanics who keep those gas lights burning. But they have decided they must lay them off.
The old gas light in the street must go? The warmth? The glow? Where would Mary Poppins have been on her night-time jaunts without them? Think of My Fair Lady. Think of eliza Doolittle in the shadows by the great columns of st Paul’s Church (the actors’ church) in Covent Garden. Julie Andrews’ pretty little upturned nose once hardly ever appeared unless it was lit by gaslight.
GAS lanterns are the essence of sherlock holmes; that white fire illuminating the fogshrouded alley. We see them in the paintings of Whistler or Atkinson Grimshaw’s cityscapes.
Dickens celebrated their reassuring glow. robert Louis stevenson loved the lighting of them — ‘for we are lucky with a lamp before the door’ — and revered the men who tended them. They are part of our London story.
I didn’t know they were under threat until a couple of fine fellows called The London Gasketeers, Luke honey and Tim Bryars, alerted me. They are campaigning to save them and sent me a photo of the one in Goodwin Court, Covent Garden. When I posted it on my Instagram, you could almost hear the murmur of appreciation and the patter of myriad likes.
Why must they go?
First of all, because, apparently, we are experiencing a climate crisis. Of course. And this minuscule diminution in gaseous energy is urgently needed because the lamps burn a fossil fuel that emits CO2.
Well, before you rush off to glue yourself to one of the lamp posts, can I suggest it might be better to do that to a passing diesel bus still belching fumes into an area recently judged one of the most polluted in europe for diesel-engine particulate matter? More simply, you might glue yourself to one of those patio heaters so ubiquitous on pavements outside noisy pubs in winter. Forty of these bad boys are the equivalent of all of the threatened gas lights, but nobody is banning them.
But it is not just climate change — there’s more. Apparently, these venerable heritage gas lamps need to be removed because they are ‘being hit by big lorries’.
You mean the polluting behemoths needed for the endless rebuilding of central London? Work which is hugely carbon expensive in itself?
These lamps are part of our heritage. The Victorian society, for example, will tell you that at least half the lights the council wants to remove are listed artefacts, protected by statutory law.
This knowledge might give it pause, except that experience often proves otherwise. Councils continuously seem to rise above existing law with judicial exemptions to overcome beauty and promote ‘progress’.
You see, this gas thing, apparently, is an urgent, emergency ‘ safety issue’, too. Those gas lights which gently illuminate the corners of our courtyards and streets are a danger! People will be vulnerable in the shadows.
The Victorian society has also shone a light into the dark corners of this fevered nonsense.
They rightly point out that not one of the endangered lights is in any area which is not bathed in existing ambient light already, from shop windows or other lamps.
WESTMINSTER claims in its own literature that it exists to preserve the heritage of the central London area. eh? It wants to ‘modify’ these old lamps by sticking bright LeD lights in them.
I just want to pause here for a moment. There are pollutions other than carbon emissions. One is light pollution. Bright LeD is widely killing off our wildlife and stealing the stars from us as we eradicate night-time across motorways, dockyards and in soulless town centres, where the shop windows blaze on while we sleep.
There is, of course, a single, simple truth hidden in all this flim-flam. These gas lamps do cost money to maintain. Once, there were hundreds
of lamplighters who paced the city at dusk with long, lighted poles to spark the gas running up the iron posts. The handful who remain are bobble- hatted British Gas engineers, who shimmy up ladders to set the gas winding mechanisms and polish the great glass casings.
Their role is as romantic as the lamps themselves, but one which the council no longer wants on their ledger.
But surely they are worth the money. Inner cities need to retain their ancient charm in order to survive. Cities need their history. Our High Streets are declining in the face of competition from shopping centres and shopping online.
The best solution is to invest in what makes our cities worthwhile: romance, heritage, conservation, elegance, history. They pay dividends on investment.
Berlin retains most of its gas lamps. Prague has started putting them back in for historic reasons. Malvern in Worcestershire has found them enchanting and kept them.
And since Westminster has allocated three million of your English pounds to achieve this desecration with LED, it does rather indicate that they have some money to burn (if not gas or even hydrogen, which has been proposed as the best and greenest solution of all). There’s a lamp post in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, isn’t there? It shines out from the dead middle of that cold, snowy forest of perpetual winter as a glowing symbol of hope and security, just like Westminster’s ones. Look at it. Yes, a gas lamp. Of course it is.
Westminster Council has nearly 300 of these grand old incandescent babies in its care. They contribute to the great quality of our capital’s intriguing historic centre, when American Candy shops, burger bars and oversized new buildings and shopping do not.
London evolved with little courtyards, squares and passages. As the season changes, and the darkness comes early, and the little shops or pubs on the corner light up, there is nowhere more romantic around five o’clock than central London.
Go down through St Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross Road, or Covent Garden, cross Lincoln’s Inn, into the Lamb & Flag, or go window shopping in Cecil Court. Walk through the shadowy lanes behind the Houses of Parliament, cross the Clubland of St James’s or into Westminster Abbey. Find character or joy.
It is the heart of London. It is the world of Betjeman and Belloc.
We are so lucky to have these wonderful gas lights and the teams that are committed to maintaining them.
Their lamps are the sort of thing that brings the world to our door and keeps our city — from the West End to The Mall outside Buckingham Palace — attractive. Let’s not let the lights go out in London.