Lighting the Streets
Back in the 1960s, I remember our dad driving the family into Birmingham on an evening close to Christmas. We weren’t going shopping – late night shopping hadn’t got started back then – and I don’t think we were visiting relatives. The purpose of the journey was simply to look at the Christmas lights, strung up along New Street and Corporation Street. I wouldn’t have realised it aged four or five, but this was a tradition that had only been going for around a decade.
According to a recent Channel 5 programme, it all started back in 1954 when the retailers on London’s Regent Street got together to put on a festive display. It must still have been considered a novelty six years later, because Kenneth Horne makes specific reference to the 'pretty lights on Regent Street' in that year's Christmas edition of Beyond Our Ken. Other streets weren't far behind, and Oxford Street soon got in on the act, with the trend quickly spreading to the provinces. A lot depended on the generosity of the local authority, with some areas getting very little besides the odd Christmas tree in the middle of a roundabout. But Birmingham was putting on large displays by the early 60s, and it was enough of an attraction to tempt families like us to make a special trip to see them.
Aside from a few years during the energy crisis of the early 1970s, the tradition has continued, with ever more sophisticated and imaginative designs. In London, Oxford and Regent Streets vie with each other to put on the biggest display and attract the biggest celebrity names to push the button at the big switch-on event. Things began to get a little out of hand when lasers entered the arena, with no one considering the potential hazard they posed, but a low point was reached when Oxford Street's Christmas lights were sponsored by the soft drink Tango, who turned the street into an all-orange advertising display with lights spelling out the not particularly festive message 'Tis the Season to be Tangoed.' A line had been crossed, and such blatant commercialisation never happened again.
Today, almost every town has a Christmas lights switch-on event around the end of November, even if (as here in Burton) the lights themselves aren’t anything special. Judging from the firework display that accompanied this year’s event, I reckon more was spent on the pyrotechnics.
Early displays were static, with sequenced, flashing lights only appearing much later. Unlike today’s LED arrays, the original lighting rigs employed bulbs or fluorescent tubes, and the more ambitious displays incorporated decorative elements such as these giant crackers suspended along New Street in Birmingham in the 1960s:
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| These Christmas decorations, dating to the 1960s, made use of the suspension street lighting system that was common on many city streets during the era. |
Such displays were, of course, limited to Christmas unless you lived in a town like Blackpool, that went in for illuminations during the autumn, or Walsall, whose Arboretum was always decked out in lighting arrays some of which were clearly of considerable vintage. In the same town, one particular street had a kind of permanent display of what had presumably originally been Christmas lights – large plastic oranges attached to the tops of the street lighting columns. I never saw them illuminated and of course, they’re long gone, but they were a source of fascination every time we visited.
Birmingham’s Christmas lights are preserved on a couple of YouTube videos – the quality is very poor, but there's just enough detail to get an idea of how the city streets looked in 1962 and 1964. Interestingly, whoever took the film also aimed their 8mm camera at a permanent advertising display promoting Schweppes drinks, which was attached to the side of a large office block that formed part of the Bull Ring redevelopment of the early 60s and remained in situ for over twenty years. The neon sign, far more sophisticated than the static festive displays, incorporated elements that turned on and off, causing the large letter ‘S’ to ‘fill up’ with light, as is well demonstrated by the YouTube video:
On our Christmas drive through the streets in 1965 or 66, I was particularly impressed by a similar advertisement for Robertson’s jam, featuring the famous Golly character. This was another permanent fixture, and the animated elements were probably what caught my eye. Both of these are now, of course, long gone, the buildings which played home to them having been demolished, and New Street has long since been pedestrianised, so our car journey of the 1960s would be impossible today.
Back then, elaborate displays of festive lighting were the preserve of local councils and traders’ associations, but in the last few decades, householders have often outdone the city streets with increasingly ambitious Christmas lights. I’m not sure when this modern tradition really got started, or went further than a few strings of lights wound around a conifer in the front garden, but around twenty years ago I visited the small town of Clowne in Derbyshire, where the residents of several streets had collaborated on their own display of Christmas lights, and this was the first time I’d seen anything organised on this kind of scale. Mince pies and mulled wine were on sale, and the whole event was being run as a charity fundraiser. Here in Burton, where the town’s lights are few and austere in appearance, residents regularly put on better displays in their own gardens: I have only to go a few yards down the road to see a couple of gardens done out as veritable winter wonderlands.
How you decorate your home is a matter of personal taste: I've never liked the trend of recent years for inflatables, and some displays simply go too far, when a simple statement can be much more effective. Of course, if you don't happen to go in for that kind of thing, and all your neighbours do, you can run the risk of looking like the neighbourhood Scrooge. Last year, I went humbug with nothing in my front windows, but this year the blue and white flashing lights are back – and that's more than enough, I reckon...
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