About
Hello! Welcome to my official website! I am Leo, a 20 year old street lighting enthusiast and collector based in Tamworth, UK. On this site I photograph local lanterns and document my collection of street lights! The collection consists mostly of SOX lanterns (nothing beats old SOX!), with a few SON, MH, MBF and LED lanterns too! I am relatively new to collecting and have spent a great deal of time reading Mike Barford's site, and decided to document my journey and findings as well, along with on my YouTube page and Lighting Gallery Page! The collection currently consists of 80 lanterns and several other lights. I have documented over 200 different types of street light and plan to increase this number much more! To this day, I still update this site so expect much more new content here! Updates usually come a couple of times a week but I do take breaks occasionally (usually lasting a week or-so). Thank you to AgentHalogen_87 & other fellow collectors for helping me with my site and much of the knowledge about lanterns I have today! There's still lots more for me to learn about, and I plan to keep collecting for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for all of the lovely comments, I love to see that my website and YouTube pages are reaching and encouraging fellow collectors!
*DISCLAIMER* This site is to document my collection and nothing on it is available for purchase.
Wiring images on pages of lanterns on the My Collection page are not instructions. Following them is not recommended, do so at your own risk. Electricity bites back!
FAQs:
1. Where did my interest in street lighting come from?
I have always had an interest in lighting (and more specifically street lighting). This began to amplify around the age of 5, when the Industria 2600s on my old street were replaced with Urbis Altras (around 2010). I stayed home from school "ill" that day, watching the crews work their way down the street, ripping out the old columns and swapping them with 6m Stanton steel columns. Once they got to the bottom of the street, I even went out and asked for a 2600! No surprise they said no haha! My street lighting interest continued to grow from there, and in 2022 I found a community who also shared my obscure interest. I invested time into learning about each type of street light, shared pictures and engaged with the community into late 2022. It would be one year later where I would get my first lantern, an Industria 2600. At the time, I thought it would be a one-off purchase, a cool ornament for my room... Later on, I purchased another Industria 2600 and a Thorn Civic 1. It was at this point that I knew I wanted to start seriously collecting lanterns. In late 2023 I approached a street lighting crew for the second time since I was 6, and got to witness a lantern swap. Shortly after, I moved into my own apartment which allowed the collection to grow significantly faster, and I learned more about the different lamp-types, photocells, gears etc.
2. Why did I create this site?
I created this website to document installations, my collection, and to act as a sort-of timeline of my journey into the hobby of collecting and photographing lanterns.
3. How many lanterns are in your collection?
There are almost 80 lanterns in the collection today (and counting!)
4. When will you stop collecting lanterns?
I have no plans to stop collecting lanterns, and once I run out of room I'll be hiring external storage to keep more in.
5. Are any of your lanterns for sale?
None of my lamps, lanterns, or other bits-and-bobs are for sale, but I do occasionally save things for other collectors.
