140d - Market Street, New Mills, High Peak

140d. Market Street, New Mills, High Peak Attached to 'The Butterfly House Café at the Torrs' is a cast iron wall bracket supporting a 1950s' ELECO 'Baldock' (or Crompton 'Sirius') top-entry lantern with a Holophane refractor bowl. The operational status of the installation is unknown, although the likelihood is that it no longer works, but may be able to work, if the conduit linking between the pavement and the wall-mounted control box retains a live supply. I had wondered whether the installation was left over from a much older street lighting scheme along the road, but until relatively recently, the lighting columns were (largely) all tubular steel columns made by Cohen, and would have been of a similar age to the Baldock lantern.

The installation appears to be in good condition if it is out of use; in all likelihood, it is given a fresh coat of paint as and when the café receives the same. The large enclosure would house the incoming supply fuse, lamp control gear (assuming that the installation ran a mercury vapour lamp) and (possibly) a time switch too.

The bracket's support strut features a noticeable indentation along its length; originally, this would have been straight.

The glass refractor bowl is the same type as that seen in my Wardle Avon lantern. A Revo finial provides the necessary right-angled between between the side-entry bracket and top-entry lantern.

Owing to dirt having gathered in the bowl, along with its refractor patterning, establishing whether a lamp remains in the lantern or not is difficult.

A small ESLA 'Harrison Type' fuse box forms part of the bracket; given the presence of the larger box below it, this may be empty, having served only as a pull-through point for the lantern supply cable when the installation was wired up originally. The Harrison Type box, incidentally, is named after Lt. Commander Haydn T. Harrison - the Company's 'Advising Engineer', and the man who, in the 1920s, filed the patent for the Company's distinctive Bi-Multi range of facetted lanterns for which ESLA is best-known.