219J. Fell Close / Cat Tree Road / Heads Drive / The Heads, Grange-over-Sands, Westmorland and Furness, Cumbria With thanks to Dwight for informing me of these Survivors. Installed on all of the listed roads are various columns supporting top-entry lanterns, with the most notable of these being a 1950s' 15 ft (5 m) Stewart & Lloyd tubular steel column and Metropolitan-Vickers ("Metrovick") SS51 - known in official publications as the "SS-Fifty One". Although the SS51 was designed for running a single GLS (incandescent tungsten filament) lamp, this may have run an 80 - 125 Watt MBF (mercury vapour) lamp instead, although the bowl is too discoloured to discern what lamp this veteran lantern runs in the modern era.
The column itself is relatively short, and requires the additional height of the bracket to increase the lantern mounting height to 15 ft.
The column structure is in good condition, with very little sign of rusting existing. A makeshift ladder bar system is bolted around the column shaft - this is likely to be obsolete, with mobile elevated work platforms now being a far more likely means of accessing the lantern for maintenance.
The Perspex bowl has clouded over time, and may have suffered with water retention issues previously, though a large hole in the underside will now prevent such a reoccurrence.
The surrounding foliage made looking up into the lantern through the hole all the more difficult.
The SS51 features a distinctive dome-shaped aluminium canopy, allowing it to be identified positively alongside products from other manufacturers.
The intriguingly-named Cat Tree Road was still home to two Thorn (originally, AEI - the parent company of both Metrovick and British Thomson-Houston since 1928; both separate company names being dropped in 1960, and all operations consolidated under the single AEI brand from then on) triangular aluminium 'Leader' columns, topped with Type 2 brackets and Beta 4 lanterns.
The bracket features a spigot cap that slips over the column - an unusual setup; ordinarily, the spigot cap fits the top profile of the Leader column.
These Beta 4s use polycarbonate bowls, which have discoloured over time.
The second example was a little further up the hill; the triangular profile fitting snugly into a narrow gap in the wall. The bracket here appears to have rotated slightly, and is no longer positioned facing over the bend in the road.
Fortunately, this Beta 4 did not suffer with arachnophobia!
Although the lanterns along Heads Drive had been replaced with Thorn R2L2 LED fittings, historical Google Street View imagery shows that they ran Thorn Beta 5 35 Watt SOX (low pressure sodium) lanterns previously. The columns here are aluminium too, but are of a tubular type resembling ELECO's 'Silverline' design.
Surprisingly, the columns carry GEC branding, however.
Another Leader column existed on The Heads, but that lantern looks a bit unusual...
It's actually a product from GEC's Z5590 series, but fitted with a Beta 4 bowl (which has also discoloured), giving a distinctly different appearance to the lantern to when it is fitted with an official GEC bowl. The bracket spigot is back to the normal design on this installation.
As can be seen, the bowl support ring is not quite level within the lantern, and its retaining clip has had to be secured with wire wrapped around the canopy.
The narrow, flat and plain doors are a feature of the Leader column design.
The GEC logo and "Made in England" is visible on the other side of the canopy, along with a Zodion SS55 (which should be known as the SS-Fifty Five for the purposes of continuity on this page!) two-part photocell detector.
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