The Lamplighters

I think I might have found my job.

Forget the lighthouse. I would like to be a lamplighter.

There is walking involved, which I am less enthusiastic about, but otherwise I get a long pole, a route of my own and the satisfaction of watching an entire street gradually light up as I make my way along it. I would also have been home before the proper night shift started, which seems like an excellent arrangement after everything we have learned about night watchmen and railway workers.

The only problem is that I have, once again, romanticised a historical occupation before finding out what the person actually had to do. The lamplighter did not simply wander around at dusk making everything look lovely. Someone had to clean the lamps, maintain them, deal with broken fittings and unreliable flames, light hundreds of them at the right time and then return later to turn them down or put them out.

I am still interested, though.

BEFORE THE STREETS LIT UP

For most of history, going outside after sunset meant accepting that it was going to be dark. Whatever light was available came from the moon, buildings nearby or something you carried yourself. London had street lighting before gas arrived, including oil lamps and candles, but it was limited and nothing like the continuous lighting we now expect from a city.

Then Frederick Albert Winsor arrived with gas.

Winsor was not actually the inventor of gas lighting, although he became one of its most enthusiastic promoters. He arrived in London from Germany in 1803 and began giving lectures and demonstrations, convinced that piped coal gas could be used to light streets and buildings on a large scale. In June 1807, he staged the public demonstration that is usually treated as the beginning of gas street lighting in London, illuminating Pall Mall with gas lamps. Historic England describes it as the first appearance of gas street lighting in the capital.

London Museum adds a detail that makes the whole demonstration considerably better: some of the gas was carried through barrels from old muskets being used as pipes.

Naturally.

If you are going to convince London that you have invented the future, apparently repurposed firearms are as good a place to start as any.

Winsor’s publicity eventually helped lead to the formation of the Gas Light and Coke Company, which received parliamentary authority in 1810 and began supplying gas commercially. The first public gasworks opened in Westminster in 1813, and the technology spread rapidly. By the 1820s, London Museum estimates that there were around 50,000 gas lamps connected by approximately 300 miles of pipe.

That is a very large number of lamps requiring somebody to go round and deal with them.

Enter the lamplighter.

ONE LAMP, THEN THE NEXT

Before timers and automatic controls, street lighting relied on people physically travelling from lamp to lamp.

The lamplighter had an assigned route and, as evening approached, made his way along it carrying the equipment required to reach the lanterns. Depending on the type of lamp and the period, he could use a long pole fitted with a flame or mechanism to turn on the gas and light it from below.

Earlier lamplighters working with oil lamps needed rather more equipment. A surviving London Museum image from around 1790 shows a lamplighter carrying a ladder and a long-spouted oil container with a burning wick, while scissors and spare wicking hang from his apron.

So, the long pole was not merely part of the nice silhouette we associate with the job. It was part of a working kit that changed along with the technology.

I like the thought of the route itself. Somewhere in a nineteenth-century street, dusk did not arrive all at once. One lamp came on, then the next, then another further along the road as the lamplighter made his way towards you.

If you lived there long enough, you must have known roughly when he would appear.

Although if he lit the lamp outside your neighbour’s house and then disappeared for his tea, I imagine there would have been words.

THERE WERE A LOT OF THEM

The scale of lamplighting surprised me.

By 1842, most of London’s major streets were illuminated by gas, and London Museum estimates that during the Victorian period more than 25,000 lamplighters worked across the city.

Twenty-five thousand.

That turns the lamplighter from a quaint individual figure into part of a huge working system. Every evening, thousands of people were setting off along their own routes to turn a dark city into a lit one, lamp by lamp.

The work also had an odd status. Gas lamps were easier to light than the oil lamps that preceded them because they did not require the same trimming and preparation. Charles Dickens even joked that gas lighting had reduced the skill involved, writing that there was “no more going the rounds to trim by daylight” and suggesting practically anybody could light a gas lamp.

I feel that is slightly harsh on the man responsible for several hundred flames attached to a network of combustible gas pipes.

IT WAS NOT JUST LIGHTING THEM

The lamps still needed attention during daylight.

Glass became dirty, fittings wore out and soot and grime reduced the amount of useful light reaching the street. Lamps needed to be cleaned and checked so that when the lamplighter returned at dusk, they actually worked.

That also meant knowing your route very well. If one lamp regularly misbehaved, another had damaged glass and a third had a burner that needed attention, the person seeing those lamps every day was the lamplighter.

The job therefore had a maintenance rhythm as well as an evening one. Light them, extinguish or turn them down, clean them, check them and repeat.

Suddenly I can see myself accidentally smashing a pane of glass on day three and quietly pretending I found it like that.

WHAT GASLIGHT ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE

When we picture gaslit streets now, they are usually beautiful.

Everything is softly golden. The cobbles glow. There is probably some fog drifting decoratively past a hansom cab.

Films have a lot to answer for.

Early gas streetlights used open-flame burners and produced much less light than a modern streetlamp. The technology improved throughout the nineteenth century, but one of the biggest changes came with the incandescent gas mantle. Rather than relying on the flame itself to illuminate the street, the flame heated a mantle until it glowed brightly.

Historic England dates the important introduction of incandescent mantles to the 1890s and notes that inverted mantles, introduced in the early twentieth century, eventually allowed gas lamps to rival the efficiency and brightness of electric lighting. Many Westminster lamps were upgraded during the 1920s and 1930s rather than simply being replaced.

That means a lamplighter in 1820 and one doing the same job eighty or a hundred years later could have been working with noticeably different equipment.

The job stayed recognisable while the lamp above his head kept changing.

THE CITY CHANGED AROUND THEM

The real importance of street lighting was not the lamp itself. It was what happened once people could see after dark.

Gas lighting made it easier to travel through streets at night and allowed shops, theatres, businesses and public life to continue beyond the natural daylight hours. Historic England describes gas street lighting as part of the development of modern urban life becoming increasingly unconstrained by daylight.

That is a fairly significant social change to have sitting at the end of somebody’s pole.

The lamplighter was unlikely to be walking his route thinking about the transformation of modern urban society, of course. He was probably thinking about how many lamps he still had to do and whether it was about to rain.

Still, each evening his work helped extend the usable day for everybody else.

AND THEN I FOUND THE CHRISTMAS POEMS

This may be my favourite lamplighter discovery.

At Christmas, some lamplighters delivered printed sheets of verse to householders living along their routes. The poems were written in the first person as though the lamplighter himself had composed them and described his work through the different seasons.

The reason for handing them out was wonderfully straightforward.

He was hoping for a tip.

London Museum holds an example dating from between 1823 and 1840, decorated with images of a gasworks, gasometer, lamplighters at work and a family Christmas meal. The museum says the tradition dated back to at least the late eighteenth century, and the sheets were delivered shortly before Christmas in the hope that residents would give the lamplighter some money in appreciation of his work during the year. Some households even kept the sheets as seasonal decorations.

Basically, the lamplighter had a Christmas tipping campaign.

I absolutely love this because he immediately stops being a little silhouette carrying a pole and becomes somebody who knew the people on his route.

They knew him too.

He had appeared outside their homes throughout the year, through summer evenings when it barely seemed worth lighting anything and winter afternoons when darkness arrived before anybody was ready for it. Then December came and he essentially handed over a poem saying, I have done a sterling job with those lamps all year, in case you had not noticed. Merry Christmas.

Fair enough.

THE WEATHER WAS STILL INVOLVED, OBVIOUSLY

There appears to be a rule with old British jobs: however manageable the work sounds at first, eventually the weather gets involved.

A lamplighter still had to complete his route in rain, frost and wind. The darker months required the lamps for longer, while a system based around open flames was naturally vulnerable to whatever the weather decided to throw at it.

Then there was fog.

The notorious fogs of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities were not simply water vapour. Smoke from domestic fires and industry mixed with natural fog to create conditions in which visibility could become dreadful. Streetlights were there to make the city easier to navigate, but in the worst conditions even the lamps struggled to do much.

Somewhere inside all of that, the lamplighter still had his route.

I may be reconsidering the lighthouse.

ELECTRICITY ARRIVES, BADLY

Electric street lighting began appearing in Britain during the late nineteenth century, but gas did not politely stand aside the moment somebody produced an electric lamp.

One of the first major London experiments took place on Holborn Viaduct in November 1878. Sixteen electric Jablochkoff arc lamps were installed, replacing eighty-six gas lamps and demonstrating just how much brighter electric light could be.

That sounds as though the lamplighters should have started looking for alternative employment.

Except the new system kept failing.

Historic England’s history of the manufactured gas industry records that a lamplighter had to remain on duty every night so that the gas lamps could be relit whenever the electric lights stopped working. The three-month experiment was also spectacularly expensive: the sixteen electric lamps cost around £10 per night to run, compared with roughly £1 7s for the gas lighting they had replaced.

Excellent.

The future had arrived, and the lamplighter was standing beside it waiting for it to break.

Some things do not change nearly as much as we think.

GAS FOUGHT BACK

Electricity improved, but so did gas.

The incandescent mantle made gas lighting considerably brighter and more efficient, and the later inverted mantle allowed it to compete surprisingly well with electric lamps. Westminster continued upgrading gas streetlights during the 1920s and 1930s, and gas remained an important source of street lighting well into the twentieth century.

The traditional job gradually changed for another reason too: automation.

Mechanical timers eventually meant that lamps no longer required a person to walk the streets twice a day lighting and extinguishing every flame individually. The figure with the long pole began disappearing even where the gas lamps themselves remained.

It was not the lamp that became obsolete first.

It was the walk.

THEY HAVE NOT COMPLETELY GONE

I assumed this would be the point where I wrote that lamplighters disappeared and we all became sentimental about a vanished job.

Apparently not.

Historic gas lamps still survive around London. Historic England reported in 2024 that there were around 1,300 working gas lamps across London, including roughly 270 in Westminster, with many protected as listed structures. Four Covent Garden lamps were newly Grade II listed that year.

London Museum goes one better and says that five lamplighters working for British Gas still maintain the remaining gas lamps. They no longer walk around every evening lighting them by hand because mechanical clock timers control the flames, but the lamps still need people who know how to maintain them.

I absolutely did not expect the answer to “What happened to the lamplighters?” to be “There are still five.”

That may be my favourite fact in the entire article.

ONE STREET AT A TIME

I think the thing I like most about lamplighters is the scale of their work.

We have railway workers responsible for keeping trains moving across a national network and lighthouse keepers maintaining lights visible miles out at sea. The lamplighter had his streets.

He knew his route and he knew his lamps. He cleaned them, dealt with the troublesome ones, lit them as darkness arrived and returned when they needed attention. People living along the route would have seen him over and over again, perhaps for years, and at Christmas he might even have appeared with one of his poems hoping they had remembered him too.

Meanwhile, the cumulative result of all those individual routes was enormous. Tens of thousands of lamps changed what London looked like after sunset and helped change what people could do there.

The lamplighter did not need to think about any of that.

He just had to reach the next lamp.