4b - Sadler Gate, Derby City Centre

4b. Sadler Gate, Derby City Centre. Along this narrow street are a number of replica heritage-style brackets, and lanterns that, whilst originally designed to run 150 Watt SON-E lamps, later ran metal halide lamps. I originally believed these fittings to be very old (hence, their inclusion on this page); however, Mr A Radley, formerly of ABB street lighting, later provided a brief history of these fittings, which dispelled this belief:

"These were purchased by Derby City Council in the mid-1990s from a company whose name I do not recall; they were located near Mansfield but subsequently ceased trading. The lights were installed by East Midlands Electricity Contracting. I was the contract manager. I remember the great difficulty we had to find a secure fixing in the old brickwork on some of the buildings. The work was entirely done on Sundays due to high volumes of pedestrian traffic on weekdays. The reason the units have remote separate photocells is that no-one at Derby City realised when ordering the fittings that the manufacturers had made no provision for fitting a photocell to the lantern and thus individual remote cells were the only practical solution. (perhaps that's why they went bust)". The lanterns and brackets were later revealed to be Kingswood products.

This photograph from August 2003 shows how the installations appeared, as originally installed. Notice the separate wall-mounted photocell unit.

One of the installations is seen out of service, in storage at the former Derby City Council Street Lighting depot on the aptly-named Stores Road, in May 2003. The optical part of the lantern can be seen to the left of the picture - notice the 1980s' Thorn control gear - perhaps the installations, therefore, are slightly older than was estimated in the above comment, though not by many years.

As part of Derby's Street Lighting PFI, the installations underwent slight refurbishment. The example pictured above is seen again in September 2015, on the right-hand side - the twelve intervening years have not not been kind to the paintwork of the building to which this bracket is attached!

The bracket's position was clearly altered after being refurbished, as evidenced by the marks left on the wall by its former position and cable runs. Notice that a third wall attachment has been added to the bracket; presumably in order to strengthen the overall fixing to the wall.

This example is located at the other end of Sadler Gate.

For their refurbishment, the brackets were treated to a coat of black gloss paint.

The lanterns, meanwhile, saw the installation of a completely new optical system; the old vertically-positioned lamp surrounded by a glass refractor being replaced with a horizontal reflector and Cosmopolis (CPO-TW) lamp. As the wall-mounted photocells no longer exist, a photocell control may have been integrated into the lanterns instead. When new, these lanterns must have been expensive, given the use of brass and copper in their construction.