112ED. Church Street / High Street, Great Missenden, South Heath, Buckinghamshire With thanks to Tim Luckett for discovering these Survivors. Owing to these streets being particularly narrow, much of the street lighting is attached to adjacent buildings, with three of these installations supporting ELECO 'Ware' / Crompton 'Argus I' / Metropolitan-Vickers 'Ryde' lanterns (the same basic design was employed for all three types). These lanterns could accommodate for 60 - 200 Watt GLS (incandescent tungsten filament) or 80 - 125 Watt MBF (mercury vapour) lamps, although these examples may have run self-ballasting mercury vapour lamps (MBFTs), owing to a lack of space to fit MBF lamp control gear in the supplied AC Ford enclosures. Now, all examples run retro-fit LED lamps instead.
The Church Street example is to be found near the junction of Abbey Walk.
The lanterns each comprise a glass bowl and prismatic glass refractor ring surrounding the lamp. The photocell must be attached to the left-hand side of the AC Ford enclosure, as a cowl has been placed here; presumably, to prevent backspill from the lantern turning the photocell off.
Although the Ware was introduced in 1946, a modern Philips 'LEDBulb' is now installed within it.
Moving onto the High Street, and an identical installation exists on the building occupied by an Optician's shop. Notice that the supply cable to the light passes behind the shop sign.
The paint marks to the surrounding brickwork suggest that the installation was repainted in-situ at some point.
The third Ware is located at the southern end of the High Street, where the road begins to widen.
As this wall features decorative brickwork at the top, the lower fixing points for the bracket have required spacers to be fitted, while the top section of the fixing plate has been broken away deliberately, and a new fixing hole drilled further down, to enable the bracket to be installed as far up the wall as possible.
With the individual LEDs of this retro-fit lamp being visible, I wonder if the bulb part of the lamp has been lost.
One slightly different wall-mounted light that is also to be found on the High Street was this one supporting a GEC Z5590-series lantern.
The bracket takes the roof overhang into account by being shaped accordingly.
Although the view into the lantern is obscured by the discoloured polycarbonate bowl, the lamp here still looks to be an elliptical discharge type.
Notice that the section of bracket pipe that is above wall height (and thus, more difficult to reach from a ladder) is painted grey, whereas the remainder is black.
One reason that the Z5590 could have retained a discharge lamp is that it appears to have become abandoned - the supply cabling is disconnected from a fuse box positioned around the corner of the building, and is wrapped around its own control box / bracket instead.
A Royce Thompson P42 two-part photocell detector is positioned on the front of the canopy.
Another notable installation that is just off the High Street is a 15 ft (5 m) tubular steel column supporting a Thorn Gamma 7 post-top at the junction of the access road to the library.
A deep ridge has formed in the lantern's bowl, suggesting that too powerful a lamp had been fitted at some point, with the heat distorting the plastic.
The silhouette of a lamp remains visible within the lantern, although the bowl's opacity prevents its type from being determined.
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