The variety of lighting supplies at first had the effect of turning London into an unevenly lit city; each of its twenty-eight boroughs made their own arrangements with the suppliers of electricity, which means that a car travelling at speed in the 1920s might pass from one street bathed in a very high light intensity to one shrouded in comparative darkness. But this had always been the case, since the city of contrasts had relied upon contrasted light. As Arthur Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects, “In London we light casually, capriciously, everyone at his own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one step and a pit of darkness at the next.” The many accidents in the 1920s, however, created a demand for a level standard of illumination, which in turn led to a standardisation of lamp-posts with columns 25 feet high and 150 feet apart. It is one aspect of London life which even the most knowledgeable citizens scarcely notice, and yet the uniformity of lighting in the major streets is perhaps the most significant aspect of the modern city.
In the autumn of 1931 certain public buildings were illuminated by floodlighting for the first time; so great was the interest and excitement that the streets were filled with spectators. It is as if London is always revealing itself anew. Nine years after the floodlighting, however, the night city was plunged into profound darkness during the black-out, when in certain respects it reverted to medieval conditions. In the streets themselves, as reported in Philip Ziegler’s London at War, “It seemed … sinister to have so many people shuffling around in the blackness”; familiar roads became “impenetrable mysteries,” leaving Londoners frightened and confused. One recalled finding her destination but only after becoming “damp with perspiration and quite exhausted.” Storms were welcomed since, in the instantaneous lightning flash, a well-known corner or crossing could be glimpsed. This sense of bewilderment and panic could have emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no less than during the Second World War, but this latter-day darkness served only to confirm how frightening and mysterious London might still become.
When the black-out was lifted in the autumn of 1944 the relief was palpable. “It is no longer inky black, but all softly lit up and shining, and all the little beams of light are reflected most charmingly in the wet streets.” Those “little beams” in later years gave way to neon, mercury and general fluorescence so that, at the beginning of a new century, the city lights up the sky for many miles around and has become a greater source of brightness than the moon and stars. For some this is a source of anger, as if the artificial city were somehow contaminating the cosmos itself. Yet there are still many streets which are only partly illuminated, and many small passages and byways which are scarcely lit at all. It is still possible to cross from a brightly lit thoroughfare into a dark street, just as it has been for the last three hundred years, and to feel afraid.
