11e. Off Western Road, Mickleover. Located approximately halfway up an access road leading to the sports field for the adjoining Royal British Legion Social Club is a 5 m tubular steel column supporting an apparently disused top-entry Thorn Beta 5 lantern. Until early 2015, the access road was heavily tree-lined, with the installation being obscured from Western Road by the well-established trees. Only with these cleared can the column be seen. Judging by the state of the lantern, it is unlikely to have worked for a number of years - the lantern's bowl is missing, with the result that the gear tray/reflector is heavily rusted. There is also no photocell fitted in the lantern's NEMA socket, and the OSRAM 35 Watt SOX lamp that is fitted can date from no later than the year 2000, as it is a 'proper' OSRAM lamp (i.e. made at the company's factory in Shaw, near Oldham, as opposed to being produced at the Philips SOX lamp factory in Hamilton, Scotland; the Shaw factory closing in this year).
Notice that the areas immediately surrounding the column have recently (September 2015) had stone chippings placed on them - perhaps there are plans for the full width of the roadway to be utilised. If this is the case, the installation must surely be living on nothing but borrowed time.
Years of disuse (and the internals being exposed to the elements) have resulted in the lantern falling into a very sorry-looking condition.
Despite the lantern's condition, the lamp would potentially still work - its barium getter is still silvery, suggesting that the vacuum within the outer bulb is intact.
Although the column is painted 'Derbyshire Green', it does not carry a unique identification number; indeed, my 1997 Derby Street Lighting inventory for Western Road does not include any column locations that would suggest that it was ever in Local Authority ownership.
The lantern, complete with its top-entry adaptor, could easily have been second-hand; perhaps the Local Authority's Street Lighting Department was asked to install a street light on the access road, and these components were on the shelf at the time.
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