Off Beechfield Park, Commercial Road East, The Willows Farm, Quarrington Hill, Coxhoe, County Durham With thanks to Oliver Davison for informing me of this Survivor. Located adjacent Coxhoe Athletic's football ground is a late 1940s' / early 1950s' example of a 25 ft (8 m) Stanton 6 concrete column, complete with a B-type side-entry bracket supporting the remains of a British Thomson-Houston (BTH) 'Mazdalux' SL6## lantern; the final two digits varying depending on the lamp type and wattage employed, along with the type of bowl fitted. As both the bowl and the lamp are long gone, the exact identity of this lantern remains a mystery. The installation is a Survivor from a 'Works' (possibly, something to do with Durham's once-prolific coal industry) that used to exist on the opposite side of the road, according to historical maps. An identical second installation, also supporting a wrecked lantern, was still present on the waste ground that was once the Works in July 2009, but this had gone by 2016, when houses were constructed on the site.
The classic combination of the Stanton column and 'shepherd's crook' bracket is, sadly, a rare sight in the modern era.
Despite the installation's age and length of dereliction, it is not in terrible condition - the bracket is cracking around its attachment to the column, but otherwise, the damage is minimal.
Curiously, BTH never produced top-entry versions of the SL600 series; side-entry was the only option.
The spun enamelled reflector is heavily rusted, with numerous parts of the steel having rusted through completely. A short section of the lantern's last lamp is still screwed in to the Goliath Edison Screw lampholder.
The aluminium bowl support ring has detached from its clip, but probably because the hinge has seized, this is not hanging down.
The column door was missing, and plants were growing up inside the shaft. Several pieces of concrete (presumably, fallen sections of the bracket) lay amongst the greenery. The old Vulcanised India Rubber (VIR) cable feeding the lantern was still visible, although the rubber insulation had perished, and the tinned copper conductors were exposed. No backboard survived, meaning that any discharge lamp control gear components have also been lost. These earlier Stanton 6 columns feature wider bases than later examples (produced in the mid-1950s onwards) do; the reason for this being because of the size of typical gear components in the 1940s, but as the 1950s wore on, component size began to reduce, allowing the column bases to follow suit. As the SL600 series could accommodate GLS (incandescent tungsten filament) lamps of wattages up to 1500 Watts, there is the possibility that this column never had any control gear installed.
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