I've been documenting the shifting quality of London's lightscape since 2017, as streetlight replacements alter the ambience of the public realm and new developments raise grids of light towards the night sky.
Excerpt from A Nocturnal Ramble:
The river is one of London’s most precious assets - a moment of expanse, where the city’s north and south sides face each other across an ancient, churning darkness, their reflected lights turning liquid. The name ‘Thames’ is said to derive from the Celtic ‘Tamesas’, or ‘dark’. I did a night walk here in 2017, along an embankment suspended in the monochrome amber of sodium light, while across the water, the bright technicolour South Bank unfolded.
The shift in tone here since 2017 is stark. The edge of the South Bank is now lined with blindingly bright festoons, while hard grids of light stack up in the background as the high-rises ascend. Here on the embankment, it’s like someone has switched on all the house lights in the theatre, leaving you blinking in a light that’s too stark, too flat, and that reveals too much. The depth and mystery of the landscape is obliterated.
In 2014 I was interviewed by Illumni* online magazine and asked to name my favourite lighting tech. I replied 'high-pressure sodium lamps'. My response was partly a provocation – sodium light was and is generally considered to be very 'poor quality' light and obsolete tech – and partly a plea to harness the full potential of LED to create a palette of light qualities, with spectral characteristics capable of being tailor-made for different contexts.
Old lamp tech was being phased out, with LED streetlight sources sweeping through city streets with the promise of increasingly efficient illumination and ever-improving colour rendition (CRI). I questioned why the lighting industry and designers were striving to mimic the qualities of daylight and interior lighting in the exterior public realm at night.
I explained why I enjoy the quality of light from high pressure sodium (SON) lamps - specifically for background, ambient illumination. Scotopic, night-time vision is naturally near-monochromatic, with low CRI, and artificial, human-made light has historically been very warm - SON has a CRI of around 25 and a warmth akin to candlelight.
Whilst the technical pros and cons of sodium light for human perception, wildlife and the night sky have been well-documented, and nostalgia no doubt fuels my affection for sodium light's qualities, I do still see real aesthetic benefits to low-CRI background illumination in the exterior public realm. A backdrop of low-CRI illumination allows lit landscape features, facades, signs and interiors to stand out in contrast - highlights of technicolour in a muted, sepia-tinged nightscape.
*Download a PDF of the interview from March 2014 below:
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