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.