The East Riding of Yorkshire is flat, prosperously agricultural and slightly off the beaten track. Deeply conservative, it isn’t the place you would normally look for originality. Over the weekend, however, its county council announced an inspired experiment. It wants to see what happens if it gets rid of large numbers of its street lights. Not the lighting in town centres, you understand, but the endless lines of light-stalks you see on the main roads that wind their way between the cornfields.
As a trial over the next three years, it plans to switch off hundreds of the lamp-stalks that march grimly alongside the road that connects York and the Humber Bridge. In future, if you drive this way at night you will encounter not a brightly-lit highway but a combination of solar-powered luminous studs in it, super-reflective signs next to it and signs near particular hazards like roundabouts that are illuminated by the movement of your car. In villages, these would be supplemented by light-emitting bollards and other street furniture deliberately built to match the scale of pedestrians and cyclists rather than cars and pantechnicons.
Why? The reasons are prosaic enough. One is money. For some years councils have been quietly switching off, or at least dimming, street lights during the small hours: indeed, in 2015 the Labour opposition sought, not very successfully, to make political capital out of this as an example of governmental penny-pinching. This much more ambitious scheme – especially since it is backed with a certain amount of government money to cover some of the costs – is similarly cost-driven. After all, the UK currently spends around £3 billion a year on street lights; to cash-strapped councils, a measure which if successful could save even a small proportion of this is worth thinking about.
Another is green politics and net zero, for once working on the side of the angels. The UK at present has more than seven million street lights: the thinking is that if this experiment works, about a fifth could be eliminated, or at least not replaced when worn out. That’s a lot of electricity, whether fossil fuel or renewable.
A third is that highway planners have belatedly worked out that a great deal of street lighting, especially on roads where cars vastly outnumber pedestrians, is simply unnecessary. Cars, and the lights they carry, are vastly better than they were 50 or 60 years ago when the road system was planned. Even fairly busy roads left in substantial darkness overnight are no longer seen as particularly hazardous. Nor, despite the continuing insistence of some organisations, is there much indication that extensive street lighting is vital to promote safety and discourage crime: indeed, perhaps paradoxically, there is some evidence the other way.
All this is sensible and correct, but it misses a further, and even more important, point. In terms of aesthetics and the quality of life of those living near roads, whether in the country or at the edge of our expanding towns, the elimination as far as possible of unnecessary street lighting is a no-brainer. Light pollution is already a serious problem in much of Britain: anyone wishing for a decent view of the night sky is now effectively limited to Scotland, Wales and the western and northern fringes of England. And even during the day, the proliferation of immensely tall lamp-posts (they can be thirty feet or more high) is extraordinarily unsightly. Anything that goes to reduce this clutter needs to be welcomed.
The elimination as far as possible of unnecessary street lighting is a no-brainer
There’s also a more general aesthetic point. Ever since Britain pioneered anti-ribbon-development laws about ninety years ago, Britain’s landscape, unlike much of Europe, has been preserved as one of contrast: concentrated development in towns, but surprisingly little in between. Unfortunately we increasingly see little of this by night. Instead of feeling of space and emptiness in the areas between towns, over a good deal of what passes as deep country much of the nocturnal view consists of serried ranks of light-stalks, which can be up to about thirty feet tall, bathing roads and surrounding farmland in a perpetual pool of ghostly yellowish phosphorescence. We need urgently to regain a bit of the magic of the difference between town and country.
And all this is without thinking of those who live on the main roads leading out of our towns, who increasingly have to accept a depressing lack of difference between day and night. Unless you can afford a large house set well back, you have to put up with a nocturnal miasma of light, probably coming from above roof level, surrounding your house and garden, and coming often disturbingly into windows.
Anything that might possibly eliminate this sort of clutter, and return rural and suburban roads to something like their earlier tranquillity and scale, needs to be welcomed. Indeed, it needs to be pushed hard. It might even be a discreet vote winner. Labour, with its contempt for the countryside and those who live there, is unlikely to be interested. Here, you might think, is a neat point of entry for the Tories, or Reform – or both.
Comments