An engaging ‘How To Be Brilliant’, a well-deserved journal article of the year, and the bravery of two young apprentices to get up on stage and present a paper – the Lighting Live Annual Conference in Glasgow was certainly memorable.
From Islington apprentices to C5s, autonomous vehicles to member bootcamps, adaptive lighting to sustainability metrics, the CPD at Lighting Live 2025 in Glasgow was uniformly strong.
Glasgow City Council’s David Dunn officially opened the two-day event, held from 18 to 19 June at Glasgow’s Crowne Plaza, with an overview of how lighting has transformed Scotland’s second city, and will continue to do soon. However, in fact, the very first CPD event was the night before.
‘BRILLIANT’ PROJECTS
Local lighting designer Nich Smith presented a lively, entertaining and informative ‘How to be brilliant’ on what he felt made for a ‘brilliant’ projects, including running through a number of his projects, including the Al Salam Palace Museum in Kuwait, as highlighted on the cover of the June edition of Lighting Journal.
‘If you have managed to work in the lighting industry for a period of time, then you are brilliant already; you have to be to have survived it and made money from it,’ he said to laughter from the audience.
‘Work with brilliant people, take risks; those are the two top things I would say. We avoid risk in engineering, surely? We manage risk? When I talk about risk, I don’t mean to introduce hazards. I’m talking about taking design risks. Sometimes you can lose track of risk when you’re designing; it’s all about designing out risk.
‘But perhaps not on your artistic side, which we all have and all use. Risk is something where you are not sure what the outcome will be, putting your limits of creative thinking to the test,’ Nich added. ‘We can all of us do a bit of that in all of our work, all the time.’
Someone who ended up taking more of a risk than he intended in Glasgow was WSP’s Toby Penter, who found himself in A&E the night before conference having, quite suddenly, gone down with Bell’s Palsy, or a sudden paralysis of the facial muscles.
Fortunately, he made a swift recovery and was able, on the second day, first present an engaging talk about his restoration of a Sinclair C5 and, second, combine with WSP’s Allan Howard to give a presentation on the issues around LED highway flicker and autonomous vehicles. Both presentations will be picked up within Lighting Journal in the coming months.
ADAPTIVE LIGHTING
The event brought together more than 30 exhibitors – and the exhibition hall was lively and buzzing throughout – and members from across the country. The traditional Tunnock’s tea cakes also proved popular with both members and exhibitors alike!
To pick out just a few other highlights over the two days, Adam Chaffey of Solaris Smart Lighting, Kelly Smith of Thorn Lighting and Anthony Smith of Stainton Lighting Design, all presented very different, but all highly informative, presentations on adaptive lighting.
Hoare Lea’s Kael Gillam took a deep dive into environmental product declarations (EPDs), lifecycle assessments LCAs, and TM66 and TM65.2. Peter Diamond of Pudsey Diamond considered whether solar systems can ever be resilient enough to work reliably all year round.
The two days of CPD then concluded with a presentation by two teenage apprentices from London Borough of Islington, Irfan Uddin and Salman Ahmed. Their talk, technically, was on ‘smart cells and the future of attachments’ – and was great – but, in reality, it was more a celebration of the bravery of these talented new entrants to the industry to get up on the ILP stage in the first place. Well done, Irfan and Salman!
JOURNAL ARTICLE OF THE YEAR
The first night of conference, as usual, included with a black-tie Gala Dinner at the Glasgow Science Centre, hosted by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, and with an evening of food, music, and a ceilidh.
The Gala Dinner also saw the award being made of ‘Lighting Journal Article of the Year’. This, very deservedly, went to Gary Thorne of Milestone Infrastructure for his candid, and deeply personal, article on suicide and male mental health in the July-August 2024 edition, (‘We need to talk’, vol 89 no 7).
Gary Thorne (right) with Alan Grant receiving his ‘Lighting Journal Article of the Year’ award
The article was described by ILP Chief Executive Justin as ‘both important and taboo-breaking’.
Gary himself after the event described his ‘immense pride’ at receiving the award. As he wrote on LinkedIn: ‘It takes a lot to put pen to paper, be resolute in what you are going to write, knowing that it may or may not be read by others who think or feel the way you do.
‘So I take my hat off to all authors of article pieces and say well done you. Keep stepping up, keep writing and spreading the word on what you are passionate about. Thanks to the ILP for being brave and choosing what is a sensitive subject and also printing my story with no reservations.’
Next year’s ILP Lighting Live Annual Conference, it was also announced, will be at the Millennium Point in Birmingham from 17-18 June 2026. So, get the date in your diary!
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the September edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
