Off Foleshill Road, Bishopsgate Green, Hillfields, Coventry, West Midlands With thanks to 'Aleksander' for informing me of this Survivor. Located within the front compound for a vehicle repair and sales garage is a 20 ft (6 m) Abacus base-hinged tubular steel column supporting a Thorn Alpha 3 lantern, for 250 - 400 Watt MBF (mercury vapour) and SON (high pressure sodium) lamps. At least one other identical installation still exists in the rear yard area too. With the garage having wall-mounted LED floodlights, the older lighting is probably no longer operational, and simply remains in place as removal would be difficult, and costly. As many other Survivor articles indicate, this column and lantern combination is common at various garage premises, with the lower-than-normal mounting height of the Alpha 3 allowing the lantern to serve as a bright area light in these circumstances, rather than part of a street lighting system.

Signage belonging to the garage is attached to the column - another reason for its retention, though I would be doubtful that anyone carried out a weight / windage calculation before attaching this to the rather elderly column shaft!

Oddly, the paint surrounding each grub screw that secures the bracket to the column has flaked away, whereas the rest of the application remains intact.

I had wondered if this example could be old enough to carry Atlas branding to the rear shoe; however, as no branding is present, this will be a later Thorn example (or possibly, a British Lighting Industries (BLI) version, if made during the period when AEI and Thorn had formed a joint company to merge their lighting interests, before Thorn bought all of AEI's lighting assets in 1967, when at the same time, GEC bought the remainder of AEI's electrical assets.

The back of the bowl is damaged around its hinged connection, meaning that only the clips are holding it in place.

In spite of the damage, an elliptical lamp remains screwed in to the internal E40 lampholder.

Unusually for its age, the hinged base section of the column featured a removable door, which has, in fact, been removed. The positioning of the fence slats made peering into the base difficult, however.

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