Fittingly for a website name called ‘The Lone Lamp’, the subject of the type of street lighting found in Britain will get a notice here. The site’s readers will know that we refer to the original teddy boy era as ‘The Golden Era’, but perhaps ‘The Silver Era’ might have been more appropriate considering the street lighting, black-and-white film and television and general drabness of the time. Indeed, little may some of the younger uns perusing these pages know that the colour of street lighting changed around the mid 1970s from white to orange. I well remember in my childhood the white light of a lampost in Lampeter that had been positioned rather strangely by itself in a back street in Lampeter and the sort of sharp moonlight silvery quality it gave to its environs and everyone and everything that passed by. It was like entering a real-life black-and-white world. This was the street lighting known to the 1950s and 1960s teddy boys, but all was to change in the 1970s as the awful orange lighting was rolled out throughout the land. Luckily – in this ted’s book at least – one of the few good esthetic developments of the last few years is the return of white street lighting through the replacement of orange street lighting by LED street lighting.
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