The beauty of gaslights

Turn down an alley off St James’s Street (the east side), lined with old painted panelling, and you are in Pickering Place, which pub quizzers say is London’s smallest public square. It is certainly charming, with stone paving, wrought iron railings, Georgian windows and a sundial on a pedestal.

A gaslight on a wall bracket used to glow sympathetically in the space. Now Westminster Council has replaced it with an LED. It had threatened to do the same for all its 299 gaslights still under council control, but a rearguard action has halted its plans.

The beauty of gaslights may depend on your starting point. They were, at a crucial moment of his life, anathema to John Ruskin. As though the railway to Venice wasn’t bad enough, he was shocked in 1845 to find by the Grand Canal, ‘gas lamps! – on each side in brand new iron posts of the last Birmingham fashion’.

But walk down the Mall in London, away from Buckingham Palace. Along the left, north side, by the garden walls of Clarence House, St James’s Palace and Marlborough House, gaslights give a hazy glow through the plane tree branches. All along the opposite, south side of the wide boulevard, harsh electric lights blare out. It seems no coincidence that, like the carefully wild verges of cow parsley and fritillaries on the north side, the gas lamps have enjoyed the conservationist sensibilities of the former Prince of Wales, now King.

His gaslights, also notable at Buckingham Palace, are among the 1,200 surviving in London outside Westminster Council’s control. The council has been dogged. Gas ‘doesn’t provide sufficient light to illuminate the highway’, it insists. But you can’t realistically call a footway under the trees by St James’s Palace a highway, nor the flagstones of Pickering Place.

The damnable detail of Westminster’s hecatomb of gaslight immolations is that it does not merely replace the glowing gas mantle with an LED, but it rigs up new glass and metal casings too. It is like replacing a real fire with ‘flame effect’ electric logs. The council has three models of lamp casing intended to ‘replicate the previous gas lanterns in appearance’. Its opponents, led by a lobby group called the London Gasketeers, are aghast at the replacement of a variety of old casings with modern fakes.

Westminster insists that the carbon produced each year by its gaslights is ‘the equivalent of 40 return flights from London to Sydney’. This means 40 individual return journeys. But each week 358 entire planes take off for Sydney from London. The gaslight equivalent hardly registers.

There’s a glimmer of hope. Berlin has 25,000 gaslights and publicises them for tourists. Westminster Abbey, with Ptolemy Dean as its Surveyor of the Fabric, not only maintains its old gaslights but installs new ones. The Abbey was one of the earliest publicplaces to install gaslight, in 1813, when the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company set up the world’s first gasworks round the corner in Great Peter Street.

The London Gasketeers were begun by Tim Bryars, an antiquarian bookseller in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road. Cecil Court, he says ‘is not quaint, it is not twee. We are not trying to stop the clock. We are just saying something beautiful exists there so let’s keep it.’