This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Tony Hatch, a 25-year-old London songwriter and producer stood at the junction of Manhattan’s 48th Street looking down to Times Square. It was his first time in New York. Mesmerised, what he heard and saw that evening in autumn 1964 was the music of the traffic of the beguiling American city and an open-air gallery of neon signs as they lit up, glowing, winking and advertising a profusion of pleasurable performances and products, into a seductively bright distance.
The words of a song began to write themselves. Recorded within weeks, “Downtown” sung by Petula Clark reached Number One in the US charts. It went global, with Clark recording versions in French, German and Italian; the bright lights of big cities were clearly compelling. If Manhattan had Times Square, London proffered Piccadilly Circus that, in 1965, reached its neon zenith.
Who, standing by the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain or sitting on the upper deck of a London bus circling it, could have failed to be diverted, delighted by or even visually drunk on the spinning neon Coca-Cola advert and its chorus of illuminated billboards for Gordon’s Gin, Double Diamond, Haig whisky and Skol lager accompanied by the “Guinness Time” clock?
Times Square and Piccadilly Circus were bright attractions, yet warm and, though exciting, somehow cossetting too.
Sixty years on from Hatch and Clark’s “Downtown”, their neon lights have been replaced by hard, white, intensely bright, computer-controlled LED displays. It is these uncivil, unkind and unimaginative new lights that are dazzling our eyes, from in front and behind, as we drive as best we can on public roads despite their blinding intensity.
It is dazzling, absolute white bright light that has transformed so many of our public places and spaces, from city streets to the interiors of shops, buses and trains, into theatres of migraine-inducing visual cruelty.
The argument in favour of cruel, over-bright lighting appears to be something to do with safety and security, with documenting our fluorescence-frazzled faces, with making roads faster for those in hock to, and in lust with, cars that tailgate and otherwise endanger the rest of us at night and, for some unfathomable reason, with transforming once-favourite spaces into semblances of operating theatres, airport lounges, supermarkets, stereotypical open-plan offices, fast food outlets, refrigerators and hospital waiting rooms.
Such new-era bright public lighting is seemingly devised by those who, for whatever reason, appear to despise shadows, birds, bats and gloaming, by those for whom the poet Yeats’s “Cloths of Heaven” — “Enwrought with golden and silver light / The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half-light” — should have been bleached and LED-lit before being spread under Maud Gonne’s feet.
Theirs is lighting as punishment, of a horror that Stanley Kubrick evoked in The Shining, its terrifying events unfolding in interrogative bright light rather than flickering Gothic gloom.
Sixty years ago, those attracted to the lights of Piccadilly Circus came here by soft-lit Underground trains, and up from Tube platforms by escalators bathed in the glow of fluted bronze Holden uplighters, by red London Transport RT and Routemaster buses, their decks lit by clement 22w tungsten bulbs or by sub fusc, soft-lit taxis. Main line trains ferrying those in search of neon-lit city streets were snugly lit.
You ride home by night today on trains, their interiors brighter, though much colder, than a summer’s day; there is nowhere to tuck yourself away, although perhaps we do live in more dangerous times than 60 years ago as CCTV cameras, when working, are given the chance to record the menace of those with souls as dark as carriages are bright.
Not that glaring bright light in public places is necessarily safe. In uncertain city streets and paths through certain housing estates, bright lights create pools of deep darkness around them, a case of, as with a driver facing fast night-time LED cars, being blinded by the light. Far better to have rows of glowing lamps to guide us safely home; or even beautifully so. Several of London’s Royal Parks, lucky streets in Westminster and St James’s, or Nottingham’s Park Estate, along with city streets much further afield, as in Prague and Berlin, are still, happily, lit by gas lamps.
Conservationists continue to have a fight on their hands to ensure these are not replaced by soulless LED lamps. Walking from Queen Anne’s Gate to a favourite cocktail bar in Jermyn Street across St James’s Park in my twenties, especially on winter evenings, was one of my all-time favourite city walks.
There are still city streets along which we can peer into intimately lit bars and bistros, or push doors open into surviving cut-glass Victorian pubs, yet some of us at least yearn for public places and spaces where light is enchanting, too. Since the madly modernising Sixties, it seems as if there has been a surreptitious campaign to bring hard light to every urban nook and corner. It appears hard to escape; in Westminster Cathedral, signs and illustrations still suggest that its magnificent interior, with its play of raw concrete saucer domes disappearing into darkness offset by pools of candle and electric light, might one day be smothered in shiny mosaics. If this threat was realised, the cathedral’s sense of numinous mystery would be lost. When I come here, I still hear the opening line of Cardinal Newman’s poem, long set to music, “Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom / Lead thou me on.”
Encouragingly, not all half-light in public places has been extinguished. Not far from Westminster Cathedral, Westminster’s Underground station, rebuilt with design by Hopkins Architects at the time of the coming of the Jubilee Line, offers a route up and down, to and from platforms, making an atmospheric and engaging play of structure and natural and electric light. If Moscow and St Petersburg can retain beautifully lit Metro stations, so can we.
Back above ground, though, cruel overbright light rules, and increasingly so, from Piccadilly Circus, via buses and trains, to your security-lit front door.
