Local authority lighting teams could be being more proactive about, and providing much more leadership around, mitigating or even banning light-polluting wall-mounted bulkheads.
By Ryan Carroll
The humble bulkhead isn’t something most people give much thought to during the day. It sits there quietly, doing its job and largely going unnoticed.
But like many lighting installations, its real impact becomes apparent after dark. Suddenly it is impossible to ignore its harsh, uncompromising light that can feel intrusive rather than useful.
At that point, the bulkhead stops being a background detail and starts becoming a nuisance, especially for anyone living near a building where they’re installed.
Last summer, in the June edition of Lighting Journal, I put a call out to the industry that it was high time we led on reducing, mitigating, or, even better, simply banning unnecessary and intrusive wall-mounted bulkhead lighting (‘Time to ban bulkhead lighting?’, vol 90 no 6).
Eight months on, it pains me to say, really very little has happened – though I have had lots of supportive comments and interesting conversations with colleagues online.
So, I’m using the opportunity of the profession gathering in the next few days in Daventry for Lighting Live Local Authority to reiterate my call, to remind my professional peers just why I feel this is an important issue we need to be discussing and, ideally, leading on.
TOO OFTEN A BOLT ON (LITERALLY)
Lighting, too often, is still just a bolt on within the planning process often conditioned to be dealt with, once ‘we’ve got approval’ – and often then, quite literally, just bolted on. This is particularly true for the community buildings within developments. Such as, community centres, sports pavilions, shops etc.
The contractor, possibly late in the day, recognises they need provide lighting on the exterior of the building as part of meeting their contract. Once power has been provided, it seems easy to grab a batch of bulkheads from the local wholesaler.
As far as they (the contractor) is concerned of course, they’ve done their job and, technically, they will have delivered under the terms of the contract. But there are better options available if the end result is prioritised over ‘ticking a box’. As an industry, I am certain we can be more involved in helping to influence lighting installations outside of street and highway lighting.
I really think, however, planners are missing a trick when they are approving a lot of these schemes. I live on a new-build estate that has been constructed in phases since 2016. So, it is all pretty recent and, you’d hope, should have embraced the most recent thinking around dark skies and sustainability.
Yet when I walk around at night lighting, quite clearly, simply has not been considered holistically– there are parts that are glary and obtrusive, others that are under-lit and feel threatening or sinister. We (lighting professionals) therefore need to be part of the conversation around not ‘just what is it going to look like at night?’ but ‘what is it going to feel like at night in that space?’.
RIGHT LIGHT, RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
As much as I do advocate dark skies and minimal lighting, this doesn’t need to compromise the quality of light. Thinking about where I live, some footpaths have no lighting on at all – in my opinion that is too far the other way, because the perception of safety is lost, especially when another person is approaching you without suitable lighting to help you see them well enough.
For me the message, to reiterate, is very much the ILP’s ‘right light, right place, right time’ mantra. But also making sure that lighting is considered as part of the actual emotional and visual feeling of the space and the development. That lighting is holistically considered. I often use try to ask, ‘what is the night-time experience here?’.
Often the night-time visual effects of lighting are perceived as negative, maybe for the reasons set out above. It is within our gift as professionals to shift the perceptions and opinions of lighting at night, so that lighting is elevated to the forefront of planning decision making and part of ‘place-making’ conversations.
The next question within this, to my mind, is how as we an industry – and, within that, the ILP – can have more of an influence on building services to promote the right kind of light fittings for the outsides of buildings? Taking into consideration of course the need to be compliant with British Standards for emergency lighting.
Emergency lighting is an art in itself and can be quite complex, however, lot of bulkheads are slapped onto building facades to satisfy emergency lighting standards, without due consideration to the appearance of the luminaires or the lit environment outside of ‘emergency’ conditions. Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of emergency lighting calculations to demonstrate the justification of most externally mounted emergency luminaires. Is this because the emergency lighting levels are easily achieved through quantity over quality of the fittings selected?
Thinking back to my earlier comment about holistic approaches to lighting, this should absolutely encapsulate emergency lighting systems. Rather than separating emergency lighting from the functional lighting system.
Lighting in the environment, whether for roads, buildings, public thoroughfares, or all of the above can be designed well with the right professional inputting at the right times during the project.
Sticking with the example of my local housing development, just a few metres away from where a wall of outward facing bulkheads are located on the community centre is the primary school that my daughters go to. Both parts of the site were in fact completed about the same time, however, both parts of the site have very different approaches to lighting.
The school has got plentiful (arguably too much) lighting on it, provided by a lot of bulkheads. But they are all downward-directional bulkheads that emit light from the underside onto the task area.Next door, too, there is a new nursery that, again, has downward-directional bulkheads, showing lighting can be well designed.
One of the challenges we face is the inconsistency and variety in approaches to building lighting and the way planners interpret it. This often leads to a lack of understanding of lighting levels, equipment and lit appearance.
PUBLIC-FRIENDLY GUIDANCE
What’s the answer to all this? First, I’d say there is argument for creating ‘consumer-friendly’ or ‘public-friendly’ versions of the brilliant ILP guidance that already exists in this area, such as GN01. This could help non-lighting professionals (such as planners and developers) better understand these questions at the development and planning stages and, at the very least, mean ‘good’ lighting is part of this conversation. A good example of what I’m meaning here is the ILP’s GN09 guidance on domestic exterior lighting. This is technically authoritative yet still written in a way that is accessible to ‘lay’ (in other words non-lighting) professionals working within this space. But I’d love to see more of this, more ‘consumer friendly’ versions of professional lighting guides.
Going one step further, in my opinion more robust light pollution policies that automatically stamp out the lowest quality products would be another good starting point for change.
Furthermore, building regulations could be amended to focus on the quality of lighting installed on buildings, as it is unbelievable to think that a community centre can be built opposite a parcel of houses that causes higher levels of glare and light spill levels towards those houses than the adjacent street lighting. Another option could be to strengthen the BREEAM assessment criterion around light pollution, again, this would automatically exclude bulkheads that emit light directly from their front face.
Second, I’d like to see professions such as environmental health being more proactive and visible around investigating and enforcing light pollution complaints. Yes, of course, local authorities are cash-strapped and environmental health teams are hugely stretched and under-resourced as it is, but they are also seriously well-placed to ensure a better, more consistent ground-level approach to dark skies-friendly illumination. To that end, the team at DFL has created a practical guide to help environmental health officers monitor, review and, if need be, enforce obtrusive light at night.
THINKING ‘OUTSIDE SCOPE’
Finally, there is also to my mind, an important call to action here for local authority street lighting engineers – so, in a way, this is my ‘Daventry call’!
In my experience, local authority street lighting engineers when asked to comment on a scheme, will quite rightly look at the Section 38 or Section 278 proposals for columns and lanterns they know they’re going to end up adopting. However, there is a huge opportunity for their expertise on other elements of lighting across a development. This then creates a real risk that other parts of the site may fall foul of glare, light pollution or obtrusive light – often, again, because of ‘afterthought’ lighting.
Planning, we all know, is complex (probably overly complex) and slow (undoubtedly overly slow) – what can and can’t be commented on during the planning approval process is something of a minefield. However, this shouldn’t be the reason why improvements can’t be made to the system, something can’t be done to bridge the gap and catch some of the poor examples of lighting that end up blighting the night.
Fundamentally, however, I do think this is a conversation that needs to be had, an argument that needs to be made, both within and outside lighting. I’m not expecting change will come overnight, or even anytime soon, but if we don’t at least start talking about this – and making our voices heard outside the profession – nothing will ever change.
So, I ask, is it time to #BanTheBulkhead in an attempt to force a more considered approach? Or, can we collectively as an industry provide the planning authority with more support, to help halt these installations before they’re granted accidental approval?
Ryan Carroll BSc (Hons), IEng, MILP is an associate director at DFL
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the February edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your left.
