155A. Wood Street, Warsop, Mansfield With thanks to Louis Cunningham for discovering this Survivor. Installed within a small car parking area behind Warsop Town Hall is a 10 m Abacus tubular steel column (made locally at the company's factory in Sutton-in-Ashfield), fitted with a GEC Z8526 lantern. When pictured, the lantern was dayburning, suggesting a fault with its integral photocell. With the lantern operating in daylight, the light source is revealed - a tubular ceramic metal halide lamp; this is a modern alteration, as the lantern would have run a high pressure sodium (SON) lamp originally. The column's placement seems slightly incongruous - it appears to be too old for the car park, and as it carries the maintenance number '48' (which isn't consecutive with any surrounding column numbers), I suspect that the column may have been taken from a nearby main road when it was due to be replaced, and re-installed at this location - the Z8526 was once a common sight in the Mansfield area.
The use of a 10 m column and high wattage lantern for a small car park also feels wrong, adding credence to my theory that this column was installed second-hand here.
This is a later Z8526, as evidenced by the refractor prisms moulded into the lantern's acrylic bowl. A few cracks exist in the plastic, and the lantern interior would benefit from being cleaned, but aside from that, the lantern is in good condition.
A rather lengthy outreach bracket is employed, with only minimal support webbing - this may make it unsuitable for supporting a heavy gear-in-head lantern. Thankfully, with the Z8526 having its gear mounted remotely, this isn't an issue.
Apart from the refractor section in the middle of the bowl, the rest of it is transparent, allowing the lampholder and inside of the NEMA photocell socket to be observed.
Opening the column's door reveals a rather rusty GEC Z1885PX ballast for 400 Watt SON lamps. This dates from January 1990 and gives an idea as to the installation's approximate age. A number of the wires terminate, untidily, into a weatherproof enclosure located in front of the column's SMK cut-out.
The smaller metal halide arc tube isn't quite optimised for the bowl refractors; as can be seen, a bright "spot" forms within the optic area.
A little further along Wood Street is this 5 m hockey stick column supporting a GEC Z9538 55 Watt SOX lantern. This pre-dates the current road and housing layout on Wood Street, and is the sole survivor from an older housing estate that was demolished to make way for the modern properties. Although it is situated on (what is now) a footpath, I believe that it is a forgotten installation, and is not in working condition. Nonetheless, it serves as a good example of a typical Nottinghamshire residential street light from the period before LED lighting became commonplace.
The lantern's GRP canopy is grubby, as is the bowl interior, from years of disuse. The column was on (effectively) waste ground in 2009, according to Google Street View imagery, and may have become abandoned shortly before that, as the Philips SOX-PSG lamp fitted looks to have had little use. Satellite imagery from 2007 shows terraced houses at this location, although even then, preparations for clearing the site seem to have been underway, with many of the properties on adjoining streets having been pulled down by this date.
The lantern uses the standard polycarbonate moulded refractor bowl, which, as always, has discoloured slightly over time.
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