Ahead of this month’s Lighting Live Annual Conference in Glasgow, the ILP brought together Scottish lighters to consider the challenges and opportunities facing the industry in Scotland, and thoughts for the future.
This year’s ILP Lighting Live Annual Conference in Glasgow is just days away, and will mean the focus for members – and the wider lighting community – will soon very firmly be on Scotland and Scottish lighting.
As part of the countdown to the conference, the ILP held a roundtable panel discussion for members of the Scottish Region as well as the wider Scottish lighting design community to consider how lighting is faring north of the border, the challenges and opportunities lighters are facing, and thoughts for the future.
The event, chaired by ILP Marketing and Communications Executive Annabel Brightling, brought together Lindsey McPhillips, senior lighting engineer at City of Edinburgh Council and chair of the ILP’s Scotland region, her colleague Steve Francey, also senior lighting engineer at the council, Glasgow-based lighting designer Nich Smith, and Stewart Thomson, principal engineer at WSP, also based in Glasgow and secretary of the Region.
‘I’m looking forward just to catching up with everyone again,’ said Lindsey, looking ahead to Lighting Live. ‘The lighting community is quite widespread across Scotland, so being able to get everyone together in the one place – which is often quite difficult for us – is one of the things I am looking forward to the most.’
‘I’ll be a newbie! It’ll be my first ILP event,’ admitted Nich, who will nevertheless be presenting a ‘How to be brilliant’ talk ahead of Lighting Live. ‘But I am really looking forward to learning a lot from people, where things are moving. It will be exciting to be coming along,’ he added.
APPETITE FOR CPD
The arrival of ILP members to the Crowne Plaza in Glasgow from 18-19 June follows on from the success of last May’s regional event with the Society of Light and Lighting at Edinburgh Napier University.
As Lindsey, with Stoane Lighting and the SLL’s Lisa Sutherland, wrote in these pages at the time, this was the region’s first post-pandemic exhibition and saw 100 guests gather to hear from an array of top-quality speakers (‘Scottish power’, July-August 2024, vol 89 no 7).
‘It was an amazing event, everyone was really excited, there was a real buzz,’ recalled Lindsey. ‘There were even not enough tables and chairs!’
Hopes therefore are high that this month’s gathering will bring a similar buzz to the Scottish lighting community. ‘I always enjoy these events,’ agreed Steve. ‘They’re brilliant; I enjoy the papers, meeting people, meeting exhibitors. It is always good to catch up with people, perhaps people you haven’t seen in years. It is such a good CPD event, too. I certainly wouldn’t want to miss it.’
‘We all know what we’re doing in our own little areas. But having the Lighting Live Annual Conference in Glasgow will, I think enable people to connect and meet people in a really constructive way,’ added Nich.
RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION
Much as they are across the UK, recruitment, retention and skills gaps are a key pinch-point for the sector in Scotland, in particular attracting young people into the industry, or even just getting them to realise that lighting can be a career, with this of course aligning with a much wider ILP priority area.
‘Recruitment into the industry is a massive issue, possibly our number one issue, and not just for Scotland but for lighting across the country,’ Steve emphasised.
‘It is an issue both from an office environment and also from an on-the-tools environment. For example, in Edinburgh we’ve got our own in-house DLO, but we constantly have issues with recruiting electricians. The majority of the electricians we hire are probably past the age of 50.
‘We don’t of course discriminate by age – we’ve had great electricians working for us who are in their 70s – but from the recruitment perspective it is a massive issue. For instance, we were recently trying to recruit for an engineer, and ended up advertising half a dozen times.
‘I’d love to see the ILP leading even more on this area, to be doing even more to encourage young people into lighting,’ Steve added.
‘I wholeheartedly agree,’ said Nich. ‘From a lighting design perspective as well, it is a huge issue. Training and feeding in that pipeline of people coming into the industry. I’m not even sure where you can study lighting design in Scotland anymore? It’s taught as part of some design degrees, but just as a module. And that creates a real challenge.
‘It means designers are graduating who are less lighting-aware; they just don’t have the training. Especially when you think how quickly this industry is changing all the time, especially technologically. But there is also an opportunity here. We could have an education sector in Scotland which gives people a proper understanding of light and gives them the time to experience and work with light as a material and to really understand it,’ he added.
GLASS HALF FULL?
Were our panellists therefore optimistic or pessimistic about the future for lighting in Scotland, Annabel asked.
‘I’m definitely an optimist,’ said Nich. ‘It is a growing field, lighting design. I think people are becoming more and more aware of light in their environment. People always have an opinion about lighting – and therefore you are always going to need people who can communicate about lighting, design with light, encourage them and find out what they want.
‘There is a massive opportunity there, I feel, and that is not going to go away. People are, if anything, becoming more visually literate as they use their phones and social media more and more.’
‘I’m also an optimist,’ agreed Steve. ‘I think there are still a lot of good things going on, a lot of great people, a lot of really brilliant engineers in Scotland.’
Both Nich and Steve, by way of example, pointed to the lighting scheme for Edinburgh’s Scott Monument as illustrative of the depth of lighting talent in Scotland.
‘It is a great approach to light and shade. It is a great scheme,’ said Nich. ‘It is a beautiful monument, just off Prince’s Street. I think it is the biggest monument to a writer [Sir Walter Scott] in the world,’ Steve agreed.
Closer to home, in Glasgow itself, the Glasgow City Centre Mural Trail (https://www.citycentremuraltrail.co.uk/) has also attracted plaudits. Started in 2008, the project uses street murals to help rejuvenate streets and revitalise buildings and vacant sites that look a bit tired, reincarnating them as beautiful pieces of public street art.
The murals create splashes of colour that brighten up the city’s lanes and streets, with the mural trail itself featuring the diverse range of art within easy walking distance of the city centre, and which work by day and by night.
When it comes to knowledge-sharing in Scotland, ss well as the ILP Scotland Region, Steve pointed to the SCOTS Lighting Group (https://www.scotsnet.org.uk/working-groups/street-lighting) as being another vibrant forum.
The group brings together lighting professionals from the 32 Scottish local authorities to share issues, knowledge and best practice on design, delivery and maintenance on road and other forms of lighting.
‘The SCOTS Group is great for helping with guidance or advice. Overall, I agree, things are looking good for lighting in Scotland,’ agreed Lindsey.
‘We had that success last year at the Napier event; that has definitely generated some optimism,’ said Stewart, bringing the discussion to a conclusion.
‘When we put these events on, people do obviously have an appetite to come to them. But the planning and work involved to get them off the ground is significant, especially as we are quite thin on the ground in terms of our committee. So the challenge is very much about keeping that momentum and engagement going. Hopefully, with Lighting Live that will continue.’
THE PANEL
- Annabel Brightling, (chair), ILP Marketing and Communications Executive
- Steve Francey, senior lighting engineer, City of Edinburgh Council
- Lindsey McPhillips, senior lighting engineer, City of Edinburgh Council and chair of the ILP Scottish Region
- Nich Smith, lighting designer and owner of Nich Smith Lighting Design, based in Glasgow
- Stewart Thomson, principal engineer, WSP, based in Glasgow, and secretary of ILP Scottish Region
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the June edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
Image: Nich Smith’s lighting scheme for the Al Salam Palace Museum in Kuwait, courtesy of Nich Smith.
