With historic lighting, you can replace or you can repurpose

Mark Harper, head of design at bespoke lighting designers and manufacturers Dernier & Hamlyn, explains why new is not necessarily best in ecclesiastical and heritage buildings

St Paul’s Cathedral interior (left) and the Pugin Room chandelier at the Palace of Westminster (right)

[LIGHTING IN HERITAGE BUILDINGS fulfils many functions. There’s the practical illumination – and in those that are open to the public that includes a legal requirement for emergency lighting. Then there is the aesthetic. Empathetic and effective lighting can make or break the environment and the ambience of a place.

Our team of craftsmen have been making beautiful bespoke lighting since 1888 and the fruits of their labours can be seen in a wide variety of ecclesiastical and heritage buildings.

One of the most notable projects was creating and manufacturing bespoke lighting for St Paul’s Cathedral, which would see chandeliers hung in the main body of the cathedral for the first time. The new fittings were produced to look as if they could have been there since the cathedral’s 17th-century beginnings, which was achieved by our team working closely with the cathedral’s design team.

Designing and manufacturing bespoke chandeliers for one of the most important ecclesiastical buildings in the world is, of course, a great honour and an opportunity that is only available very rarely. What is more usual in our work is using archive imagery to inform replication of lighting that has disappeared over time or has been damaged to the point of being unrepairable.

Our largest project of that type was at the Palace of Westminster, which our team worked on for some 30 years – restoring and manufacturing beautiful chandeliers for various areas, including the chambers in the House of Commons and the House of Lords as well as many other important spaces.

Sometimes our team works to repurpose existing lighting for a new application. A great example of that is at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. When new visitor welcome facilities were introduced in the King William Undercroft, a new public entrance was required to be lit by historically appropriate external lighting. The designers proposed new over-door lighting to match existing entrances and asked us to convert a lantern formerly mounted on a stone pedestal elsewhere on site into a wall-mounted bracket fitting. That not only ensured architectural integrity, but also provided a cost-effective solution.

While at Belfast City Hall we designed and manufactured a range of fittings, including a 1.3 tonne chandelier, which is believed to be the largest chandelier in Ireland, to replace one that was damaged beyond repair when the building was bombed in 1941. The only reference material available was photography from the turn of the 20th century and it is not known what became of the original chandelier. As costs become ever more in focus and with eyes increasingly on sustainability issues too, we are increasingly working on projects to restore existing lighting rather than manufacture from new. For example, we refurbished and upgraded 14 of the light fittings at St John the Evangelist Church in East Dulwich, including restoring the gilding and adapting the fittings to accommodate energy-saving LED lamps. And if you came to our factory today you would see our team working hard to restore and replicate almost 100 light fittings of various types for a 1930s public building that is set to reopen in the autumn after extensive refurbishment. In summary, new bespoke lighting for heritage buildings can be the best solution for some; but in many cases the more cost-effective, sustainable and historically accurate way will be to restore or repurpose Belfast City Hall what already exists. q www.ecclesiasticalandheritageworld.co.uk 21