57AM. Victoria Street / Flag Lane, Coppenhall, Crewe, Cheshire With thanks to Leo Conway for discovering these Survivors. Installed on both of these roads is a concrete column that has become redundant through subsequent relighting work; in the case of Victoria Street, this comprises the remains of an 25 ft (8 m) GEC column, which may have once supported a Z8430CM lantern, for a 250 - 400 Watt MBF (mercury vapour) lamp - if this is true, the installation probably dates from the late 1950s, being concurrent with the construction of the Queensway precinct development. This photograph from around 1960 shows double-arm versions of these GEC columns, all of which support Z8430CMs. The surviving column is somewhere in the background, but the picture resolution is too small to be able to discern what lantern was fitted at the time. One double-arm column remained extant on Charles Street until redevelopment of the whole Queensway site saw it removed. This retained its Z8430CMs until some point after May 2017, when the lanterns were changed to Urbis Ampera LED types instead. Another redundant column existed on the corner of Charles Street and Victoria Street until it too was removed as part of the redevelopment scheme.
The column has been in this neglected condition since March 2009 (at least).
The bracket was removed as part of the decommissioning work; a small section of the internal steel pipe is exposed.
Although nothing but an old length of steel-wire armoured cable remains in the doorless base, by May 2024, the aperture had been plugged with the column's old backboard, a Tamtorque band and two lengths of cable location tape. For the years prior to this, the base was completely exposed.
The disused column on Flag Lane is a 15 ft (5 m) 'Byway-X' type made by Concrete Utilities.
The bracket, and part of the top of the column, has broken away, exposing two of the column's internal reinforcement rods. Google Street View historical imagery again comes to the rescue in determining how the column looked previously - a short outreach side-entry bracket with an upward tilt of 15 degrees supported a Philips MI 26 35 Watt SOX (low pressure sodium) lantern.
The door remains in place here, although I doubt that there is much in this base either, given that the MI 26 tended to have the lamp control gear installed within the lantern itself. The column's condition continues to worsen, with several chunks of concrete having fallen from the damaged top section and onto the ground below.
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