Turn down an alley off St James’s Street (the east side), lined with old painted panelling, and you are in Pickering Place, which pub quizzers say is London’s smallest public square. It is certainly charming, with stone paving, wrought iron railings, Georgian windows and a sundial on a pedestal.
A gaslight on a wall bracket used to glow sympathetically in the space. Now Westminster Council has replaced it with an LED. It had threatened to do the same for all its 299 gaslights still under council control, but a rearguard action has halted its plans.
The beauty of gaslights may depend on your starting point. They were, at a crucial moment of his life, anathema to John Ruskin. As though the railway to Venice wasn’t bad enough, he was shocked in 1845 to find by the Grand Canal, ‘gas lamps! – on each side in brand new iron posts of the last Birmingham fashion’.
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