57AD. Delamere Street, Crewe, Cheshire With thanks to Dwight for informing me of this Survivor. Installed opposite the town's brand new (as of 2024) bus interchange and multi-storey car park is a sleeved 25 ft (8 m) GEC ZP1000 concrete column, supporting a Z9454 lantern for 90 Watt SOX (low pressure sodium) lamps, and possibly older 140 Watt SO/H and SOI/H types too. Owing to the building works, this is the sole-surviving example of Delamere Street's older lighting scheme, which probably dated from the 1950s' construction of the Royal Arcade shopping precinct; the rest of the columns having been replaced as part of the rebuilding work. As it is, a new column is installed almost immediately opposite the concrete one, suggesting that the old installation could be removed too in the near future.
With all of the nearby modernity, this column now looks decidedly incongruous, though of course, it too would have seemed modern and bold when installed.
The Z9454 is (possibly) the original lantern to have been fitted to this column around seven decades earlier - the bowl is covered in stress cracks, and also does not feature any refractors below the lamp, which I believe, was a feature of early Z9454 bowls.
If the lantern is original, it would have been transferred to the sleeve bracket when the original concrete one was replaced.
With the column having a largely square-based profile, the sleeve is, similarly, rather chunky.
The cracking and crazing is less prominent on this side of the bowl.
The original GEC door remains in place at ground level.
CLICK HERE TO MAKE A MONETARY DONATION
© 2002 - English Street Lights Online