I’ve much respect for the Matlock Mercury: our part of the Derbyshire dales would be the poorer without this lively and conscientious local paper. And were it not for the Mercury’s useful report I’d never even have learned about the county council’s plan. But I do take issue with the headline. ‘Big switch-off to hit Dales villages’ turns good news into bad; and most of us won’t see this as bad news.
The idea is to switch off street lighting in the county, where appropriate, first in villages and then in parts of towns, between the hours of midnight and 5.30 a.m. For most people this will be no inconvenience, and for many it will be a blessed relief. Progressively over the last century we have been engaged across the British Isles in an ugly, expensive and futile attempt to abolish the night. I’ve raged against this in the Spectator; now, at last, a local authority seems to agree.
I have never understood the British appetite for street lighting. Much of it, I suspect, dates from Victorian days of dingy back alleys, foggy street corners and the fear of rascals leaping at us from the shadows. In an era when battery-powered flashlight torches did not exist and there was no way you could light up your porch or front-step at the flick of a switch, I suppose there was comfort to be had from a measure of permanent illumination in city streets. There is no doubt, too, that along busy roads or urban thoroughfares with constant traffic, and in certain lonely precincts where the ill-intentioned might lurk, outdoor lighting provides safety and reassurance. Wherever there’s a genuine need for cctv there’s a need for lighting too; and accident records will pinpoint for us the highways where night-time illumination will make a difference.
But you can concede all that, and make a big map of our entire island with every such area indicated — and still fail to justify the thousands of square miles, and tens of thousands of miles of often empty road verges, into which we are tipping vast quantities of expensive and carbon-creating electricity through all the lonely hours before dawn, succeeding only and magnificently in illuminating the undersides of clouds.
We pay to cast an all-night glare onto our rural lanes and suburban streets, then pay again to buy blackout curtains for our bedrooms so we can sleep. Birds are bewildered, astronomers are confounded, motorists passing from lit areas into darkness are endangered — and the risk for pedestrians is simply transferred from the lit patch to those many patches and corners that cannot be properly lit and where we may stumble as our eyes fail to adjust to the change.
The British Astronomical Association estimate that light pollution here has increased by about a quarter in the last seven years: a third of night-time illumination outdoors goes straight up into the sky. Meanwhile, in the rural part of the Peak District where I live, almost everybody is indoors by midnight and the vast majority are in bed. Why then do we line our village streets with steel poles with glaring lights atop them? I’d estimate that were you to sit under a streetlight from midnight to 5.30 a.m. in my nearest village, Elton, and count the pedestrians who passed beneath it, the fingers of one hand would often be sufficient. With the savings from switching them all off I reckon you could provide a free torch and a lifetime’s supply of batteries for everyone in the village.
The first phase of what the Mercury calls ‘the county’s big switch-off’ will be weighted towards my part of Derbyshire. We should count ourselves lucky. Will Roy Hattersley in the lovely little village of Great Longstone be deterred from taking his celebrated dog for a late-night walk? Certainly not. Will my llamas miss the orange twinkle across the valley of Elton’s bizarre outpost of a lone streetlight at the bottom of the village where nobody lives? No, moonlight is enough for camelids. Does beautiful Stanton-in-Peak, clinging to its slopes where it hangs in the sky high above the dales, enjoy appearing to the rest of us like some kind of stellar constellation all night? I doubt it.
Will Dethick, Lea and Holloway miss their night-lighting? Well, Florence Nightingale managed well enough without it as she walked between her home and Whatstandwell railway station. Will Baslow mind? Surely not: those rich enough to live there can afford a torch, and have migrated over the moor from Sheffield to escape the bright lights, not recreate them. As Lord Hattersley himself has remarked, when good Sheffielders die they go to Derbyshire. Street lighting vulgarises a village, and the smartest places are the darkest.
Derbyshire — a fairly typical mix of suburban, industrial and rural England — is a good illustration of both the problem and the opportunity. The county council maintains some 89,000 street lights at an annual cost of more than £5 million. They plan progressively to remove about 900 streetlights completely, and to operate another 40,000 from dusk to midnight only, cutting night-time illumination overall by perhaps about 20 per cent. This alone will save more than £400,000 a year on energy bills, plus another £220,000 to pay for carbon emissions. They will maintain lighting wherever a good case can be made for it…
And if I’m beginning to sound like a publicist for a (now) Conservative-led county council, then too bad, because this is a brave, sensible move, but one which will cause the inevitable shroud-waving and squeals of outrage. The county council will resist them. So should we. Let’s resolve to eat more carrots, watch our step in the night, and find again the beauty of the dark.
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