An age of bright new lights on ugly new estates

‘Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,’ remarked the journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, ‘is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.’ He was right, but the fault lies not with the newspapers. The problem arises from the idea of news. ‘News’ cannot see so much of what’s happening that matters.

As the new year begins I’d ask you to consider a small example: the most visible change to the built environment in Britain. I’ve yet to read anything you could call a ‘splash’ on the subject, but gradually, steadily, and in time no doubt universally, we’re losing our yellow-orange ‘sodium’ streetlights, in favour of blue-white LED ones. And because LED is more tightly focused in its illumination, the appearance across the landscape is of thousands of small pools of uncoloured light, instead of one diffuse and generalised orange glow.

In its day, sodium street lighting represented a great advance. It was more energy–efficient, and widely thought to be less displeasing, than the street lighting that I can just about remember: illumination that played tricks with depth of vision and made everyone look green about the gills. So people of my generation would (if they think about it at all) associate orange sodium lights with modernity. Britain was early to embrace sodium. Flying in, I associated those strings of orange lights beneath our wings with home.

Soon they’ll be a thing of the past. Just as sodium lighting once represented an advance in efficiency, so the LED lighting with which local and national government are replacing it offers further gains. LED illumination, being more like spotlighting, can be accurately trained on its target — the ground — rather than surrounding trees and the underbellies of clouds.