As a follow on from my December post on Kings Parade lighting. I’m pleased to record a bit of progress.
Whilst doing one of my experimental Cambridge Walks (this mornings was to try and walk from the railway station to the river and back without seeing any modern shops and using all the old passageways and parks) we happened to see one of the first modern street lights on Kings Parade.
Seems a big improvement on this:
All though, it has to be said the lighting, for such an historic street, is still a chaotic mess. Why does Great St. Marys church require 4 huge high intensity lamp standards? Maybe we should go and remove ALL street lighting and silly posts marking the end of parking bays (surely they can be screwed to walls or the kerb?) installed after 1970 thus saving the council large amounts of money and cleaning up the street!
I really liked the design of the new street lamp…… but it looked out of place next to all the others and I mean ALL as there were tons of them, far more than in many Norfolk Villages.
Thanks Geoff for following up on this. I too have come upon these plans to remove the Richardson Candles. I started a thread on cam.misc, that resulted in Simon contacting me.
Simon is a collector of streetlights, and very knowledgeable. His website has details of the Cambridge lights. These lights have clearly not been adequately serviced and are mostly in a poor state in terms of their light output. I am very keen that these lights be kept in place, and have various ideas for renovating and refurbishing them. This will mean making some realistic proposals to the County for the future of the lights. Removing them will at least be very unpopular, so they may be open to an approach.
I can be contacted at: john.lawton AT ntlworld DOT com
Simon’s website:
http://www.simoncornwell.com/lighting/install/cambridge/rc/index.htm
cam.misc thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/cam.misc/browse_thread/thread/7e399c06a7ddcdb9/5e04595459d54362