The lamps are going out all over England, according to a survey which shows that 106 out of 150 councils are turning off or dimming streetlights to save money. Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, thinks this is welcome news, while Hilary Benn, his shadow, thinks it is appalling and will compromise the safety of citizens. Artificial light is both good and bad. It deters crime and facilitates the flow of both people and vehicles at night. But it also disturbs our sleep and stops us seeing the stars. Early street lighting was an adjunct of policing and a form of surveillance. Smashing street lights was a revolutionary act.
Some forms of public lighting found aesthetic favour. Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, loved gaslights. But he hated their electric successors. “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eyes,” he wrote. “A lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horrors.”
But the worst aspect of light pollution is that it erodes the difference between night and day and masks the constellations, depriving us of that nightly reminder of how unbelievably vast the universe is, and how small we are by comparison. Recent figures suggest we can now see the night sky better, thanks to cuts in public lighting. Mr Pickles is right. Better dim the lights than dim the stars.
