It has struck me recently how dark the streets are. In truth, I don't think this is something that has just happened. I have a feeling - although I can't prove it - that street lights are being fitted with less powerful bulbs, no doubt in some half-baked attempt to save energy. There is a road near me which repeatedly strikes me as too dark. I have been struggling to work out the reason, and why I have noticed it only relatively recently in the many years I have been using it. I don't think the gap between the lamp-posts is too wide, and, other than the fact that I have convinced myself the bulbs are dimmer, I can only put it down to the lack of light from properties facing onto the street. This is partly because at one point, on one side there are workshops with little in the way of windows, and on the other side shops, many of which are shuttered in the evening. It may also be that the fashion for leaving one's curtains open to make one's front room visible to the outside world has passed.
This afternoon I was walking along my own road and something struck me as different. I honestly don't know if this is a recent addition, or it's merely that I have failed to notice it, but there is a major and significant difference.
For as long as I can remember street-lights have pointed out into the street. I would guess on my road they are about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. Someone, presumably from the council has come along and added new lamps to the existing posts, about ten feet up and facing onto the pavement, thus illuminating the pavement.
Such a simple but brilliant idea. I think what it means is that when people are walking home after dark, rather than scuttling along anxious in shadow, they will be walking along a well-illuminated path. It was too early in the day to tell whether it works in practice, but it seems so obvious. I don't know what it means in terms of lights shining into people's houses, and certainly, I am rather sick of the front of our house being bathed in constant neon light from the derelict monstrosity of a crumbling white elephant that is 30 Streatham Place (the front rooms are never dark). But I am all in favour of simple, and, presumably relatively inexpensive ideas that increase safety. As I found out after the infamous firework incident, CCTV is useless at night because...it's too dark. Duh!
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