21b - Off Station Street, Burton-upon-Trent

21b. Off Station Street, Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. At one of the entrances to the car park for the Cooper's Square Shopping Centre is a 20 ft Stewart & Lloyd tubular steel column supporting a gear-in-head Thorn Alpha 7 lantern. I have never seen it lit, but it probably still works (or 'could still' work), though what lamp is fitted, and how it is controlled, is unknown. There are a couple more Alpha 7s mounted to the wall of a nearby building, but again, I don't know if they work. The installations are likely to date from when the Shopping Centre opened in 1970, and could be left over from the original lighting scheme for the nearby car park.

Despite being relatively streamlined, the Alpha 7s still appear rather too large for such a low mounting height.

A single stainless steel toggle secures the aluminium ring supporting the toughened glass bowl.

The sealing gasket appears to have worked loose within the bowl area. Despite this, the bowl's interior looks clean, and an elliptical lamp is visible within the optic.

Slight corrosion is present to the control gear cover.

The wall-mounted examples are similarly in good, intact condition. Even allowing for distortion from the bowl refractors, the lamp in this example looks almost too large for the lantern - the Alpha 7 was able to accommodate MBF lamps of up to 400 Watt, and so this may well be such an example.

The other lantern is fitted a little further along the alley. From this angle, its design bears more than a passing resemblance to the Revo Horizon Major lantern.