The Sunset of the Sodium Streetlight

An ode to Europe's fading lights

Last week, I found myself comforted by a city I had never known: Palma de Mallorca. The alleys of its historic centre are lined with green-shuttered apartments, its roofs are red-tiled, it smells of cigarettes, and around every corner there is either a cafe, tapas bar, or both. At night, the streets of Palma are transformed from chattering, vibrant urbanity to a soft orange quiet. This shift occurs near seven o’clock, when the sky gets heavy with dark blue, and the streetlights turn on. These golden bulbs make everything romantic; buildings seem closer under the low glow of the lamps, faces are gently dimmed, and the ocean glimmers. I could walk for hours and hours in an old city with winding cobblestone and sodium streetlights. Tragically, this classic European city’s luminance is slowly being replaced by white fluorescence. 

First introduced in the 1930s as Low-Pressure Sodium (LPS) bulbs, these streetlights produce a distinctly monochromatic yellow glow. They have excellent lumens-per-watt, meaning they provide a large quantity of light for relatively low electricity expenditure. LPS bulbs are incredibly effective at penetrating fog and rain, due to the longer wavelength of orange-yellow light. The monochromatic nature of these lamps also has a beautiful, soothing effect: colour perception is diminished, throwing streets into shades of yellow and black. This allows cities to appear in a charming grayscale at nighttime. 

In the 1960s, LPS bulbs were replaced by High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) bulbs. These bulbs allowed for greater colour perception and a higher intensity of light, even until the end of the bulb’s life cycle. Due to their high lumens-per-watt efficiency, HPS bulbs were installed throughout European and North American cities during the energy crisis of the 1970s. These amber streetlights are the ones that remain in small numbers today, illuminating cities like Paris, Rome, London, and Prague. 

The feel of a city at night is so greatly dependent on how it is lit. Just as a restaurant with fluorescent lights immediately feels sterile, cold, and unappealing, a city with white LEDs is made flat and uncanny. White LEDs are polychromatic, as white is a mixture of varying wavelengths. While this allows streets to be seen in far more colour than under HPS bulbs, it also has a clinical, almost drying effect. It’s like a warped imitation of daytime. Personally, I am far more prone to headache under the fuzzy, flickering glare of blue, purple, and green fluorescence than the steady mellow of orange lamps. Interestingly, there is a psychological explanation for humans’ affinity for warm light at nighttime. Amber sodium bulbs mimic the sunset, following our natural circadian rhythms. The lights aid in producing melatonin while reducing cognitive arousal. They’re also, quite simply, beautiful. 

Sodium streetlights have often been rendered in artwork for exactly this reason. In his 250-work series, Northern Lights, Manchester-based artist Chris Cyprus captures their golden charm. His paintings depict a variety of urban and suburban scenes from Northern England: parks, pubs, telephone booths and tunnels, little inns and stony alleys. One will notice, in Cyprus’s artwork, just how elevating yellow lamplight is. It smiles against the blue of the night, gentle and cosy and almost melancholically calming. His paintings feel so dreamily familiar, returning me to childhood summers in Bucharest, strolling down softly lit boulevards with my parents. Cyprus’s work is a kind of mourning, one that echoes with nostalgia; today, most of the streetlamps of his subject have now been fitted with the more energy-efficient (but beauty-repellant) LEDs. 

German artist Rut Blees Luxemburg made sodium streetlights a provocative muse in her 1990s photography series, London — A Modern Project. In her work, Luxemburg focuses on the architectural body of London; its highways, streetsigns and skyscrapers all made sublime under the yellow glow of sodium. In pieces like Towering Inferno (1995) and Meet me in Arcadia (1996), Luxemburg’s wielding of light produces a vertiginous, haunting effect. The urban residential areas feel at once corporeal and fictional, so distinctly human-crafted under the scattered light. She often captures these scenes from great heights, letting the viewer dissolve into them. 

The loss of sodium streetlights is violently changing the landscape of European cities. I can only hope that we may find a warmer, more comforting alternative to the stabbing headache of cool LEDs; otherwise, the amber cities of nocturnal Europe may recede into memory, recalled only by the brush of an artist or the click of a camera. 

Illustration by Kyla Biesty