Architecture: how street lights have illuminated city life

Dogs understand lamp posts. These urban markers, points of illumination that allow the streets to be read and navigated in the dark as they are in the day. Dogs mark them for scent, we use them for vision — but, for both species, street lights hugely expand the sensory environment.

Street lighting might seem like a product of modernity, but there is nothing new about it at all. Romans illuminated the streets with oil lamps, and cities from Baghdad to Córdoba were similarly lit when most of Europe was living in what it is now rather unfashionable to call the Dark Ages but which were, from the point of view of street lighting, exactly that.

The streets of London were reputedly illuminated in the 15th century. Lord Mayor Henry Barton issued a decree in 1417 that inhabitants must hang lanterns outside their houses in order to light the street. In 1524 Parisians were compelled to put a candle or lamp in their street-facing windows for the same reason. It must have been quite a sight — a poetic inversion of the role of the window as a mechanism for allowing light into the interior, using the private to illuminate the public realm. By the 18th century, however, Parisians began to object to the city dictating their habits — candles were expensive and it was seen as a tax.

After this, cities across Europe made attempts to light their cities using lanterns strung between houses on ropes or chains which could be lowered — in the narrow alleys of some Italian cities you can still see electrified examples of these. Yet, these lanterns attracted new opprobrium, becoming the targets of vandals and criminals who delighted in smashing them with stones. Some people, it turned out, didn’t want the streets illuminated.

Darkness facilitates transgression. The night-time streets and back alleys of the city were once the domain of criminals, pickpockets, prostitutes, sexual adventurers and low life, who liked it dark for their own reasons. Illuminating the night-time city was seen as a colonisation of the dark by the bourgeoisie; and it was deeply resented — quite often, incidentally, by the middle classes themselves who could now be recognised and identified as they went about their own shady transactions.

When more concerted efforts to light streets began in earnest, using lanterns hung on iron poles (lamp posts), it was the police who were usually responsible. In Paris, street lighting would later be paid for from the police budget and was often resented as an unwarranted imposition of authority. It was seen as part of Baron Haussmann’s reordering of Paris as a place less amenable to revolution. During the 1848 uprisings, revolutionaries smashed street lights in order to move around the city undetected. The lights became a tool of social control.

The big leap forward arrived with gas, which was pioneered in Britain, the first street to be lit being Pall Mall in 1807. Gas lamps weren’t new — as long ago as 500BC the Chinese used volcanic gas fed through bamboo pipes to illuminate the streets of Beijing — but in Europe and the US they ushered in a new era for the street, the possibility of 24-hour consumption.

For a few decades after its introduction, the street light radically altered the city; it not only prolonged the period in which work could be carried out in the street but the poor, who couldn’t afford to light their rooms, suddenly found the street brighter than their homes and occupied the streets at night, often disconcerting the authorities.

On one hand, prints from the 18th and 19th centuries show people reading beneath the bright lights of the big city, saving their eyes from dim, domestic candlelight. On the other, a device conceived in part as a mechanism for social control and crime prevention inadvertently encouraged a not always desirable night-time economy, notably the huge sex industry. It has been estimated that one in five women in 18th-century London was a prostitute.

All this makes it unsurprising that the street light embodies a curiously mixed iconography. There is the image of the prostitute leaning on the lamp post, just as there is of the raincoat-clad private detective. But there is also the lamp post as musical prop — the fulcrum around which Gene Kelly dances in Singin’ in the Rain or the one on the corner being leaned on by George Formby.

The darker side of illumination appeared during revolutions where lamp posts were transformed into public gallows. During the French Revolution one particular lamp post in Paris at the corner of the Place de Grève and the Rue de la Vannerie (by the Hôtel de Ville) became the most popular impromptu gallows and, until the invention of the guillotine, the lamp post was a de facto symbol of the revolution. The French still use the expression “à la lanterne” in the way the English might say “string ’em up”.

Lamp posts were also subject to decoration and elaboration. Cast iron’s capacity for modelling lent itself to complex detail and baroque ornaments — and the sculptural language of the street light is a story in itself — but it tended to be an amalgam of lanterns and globes, curlicues and baroque scrolls and often veered into sculptural motifs including fish, monsters, dragons, foliage, putti, crowns and classical columns.

Illuminating the night-time city was seen as a colonisation of the dark by the bourgeoisie

Among the earliest electric lights were those on the newly built Thames Embankment (1878) and they remain some of the finest essays in sculptural street furniture, incorporating acanthus leaves, vines, lions’ heads, classical capital and fluted shaft and coiled, Bernini-esque sea monsters.

Perhaps even better are those in Ljubljana. Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik transformed his native city in the years between the wars, not only through buildings but with street furniture. His lamp posts used a variety of designs based on abstracted classical columns and mythical creatures, and demonstrate how simple street furniture can enliven the streetscape and give a sense of identity.

Modernism almost ignored the street lamp, reducing it to a utilitarian steel or concrete post. Yet even a lamp with the dullest design is able to transform the night-time street, once it is switched on. The strangeness of this transformation is embodied in René Magritte’s haunting “L’empire des lumières” (1953-54) in which a street light illuminates an unsettling night-time streetscape under the canopy of a daytime sky above.

The way in which night coexists with day is the perfect cipher for a device that turns darkness into light but also an intimation of the unnatural state of the city, a place that comes alive and becomes, perhaps, most completely public, when it is darkest.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic

Photographs: The Kobal Collection; Bridgeman Images