SIR.—My pulling of an august leg in protest against the
IVIVBE style of architectural lettering involved me in quite another argument, about which I would like to say that there is much barking up the wrong lamp-post. I believe that the critics would be more successful in their campaign if they addressed them- selves not to the design of the standards (many of which, including those at Ampthill, are properly on the `approved' list of the Council of Industrial Design) but to three other matters: the shape of the lantern, the height of the standards and their too- close spacing. I have seen well-designed standards spoiled. by gawky lanterns, indifferent standards made acceptable by well-designed lanterns.
There is a deplorable requirement that the stan- dards should be twenty-five feet high and spaced at not less than 120-foot intervals. This is no doubt proper for dual carriageways: it is intolerable in the narrow streets of an old town, where road safety is properly governed by speed limits.
The height and spacing formula springs, 1 believe, from the 'Code of Practice' prepared by the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the British Standards Institute on the .basis of studies by the Ministry of Transport. What are recommendations seem to have become a rigid law: yet the Code of
Practice itself says that 'street lighting is as much an art as an exact science.' In the streets of an old town the standards are too close and too high: the lumens sin against the light.—Yours faithfully, 16 Great lames Street, WC/
FRANCIS MEYNLLL
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