Local Urbis Saturns

The Saturn sees very little use in Derbyshire; it nowadays being confined solely to lighting a section of Derwent Parade, the road that links Derby's Wyvern retail park to the Pride Park business park. This was the first road on Pride Park to open to the public, back in 1996/7; roads that opened subsequently were lit with the near-identical WRTL (formerly Kingswood) Circa lantern. Both the Saturns and the Circas were fitted to 10 m tubular steel columns accommodating cast iron embellishment kits. These were painted red, with details highlighted in cream - the colours of the former Midland Railway Company; the site having previously been occupied by the Locomotive Works. Prior to the Derby Street Lighting PFI, Saturns were also employed along the bustling thoroughfare of Normanton Road, in the Arboretum Ward. These Saturns differed from the Pride Park examples in that they were painted green and were fitted to Urbis 'Cascade' brackets. They were also installed a few years before the Pride Park examples were.

This is one of the first 'unusual' columns that is seen on Pride Park when travelling from The Wyvern.

A Royce Thompson Oasis 1000 20 mm threaded photocell rated at 70 Lux can be seen fitted to the rear of the lantern.

Despite the use of the different lanterns, the columns and brackets are very similar in appearance, in order to create a seamless and uniform appearance to lights that were installed on separate schemes. One minor difference with these earlier installations are the embellishment kits fitted to the column bases - on these columns, the Urbis 'Chatsworth' pattern is used; the rest of the columns use a different pattern. The columns themselves are all made by Fabrikat, however.

The lanterns attach to decorative 'hoop' style brackets.

At the time of photographing, one lantern was dayburning. The lantern also appears to have rotated out of the correct alignment - the lamp should be facing the same direction as the bracket above it is! The reflector employed in this lantern is the same type as is fitted in my ZX3 lantern - the 1289.