Gas lamps have twinkled through the fog in every period film set in London, lighting the way for Ebenezer Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes, and the merry murderers of The Ladykillers. Yet few people are aware that 1,500 gas lamps still shine on in the city every night. Or rather 1,498 since a reversing lorry demolished one outside St James’s Palace, and then, to the driver’s hideous embarrassment, returned the following week and demolished another.

The necklace of lights strung on lamp posts, some up to 200 years old, stretches from Bromley-by-Bow in the East End to Richmond Bridge in the west of the capital. As the Guardian accompanied lamp lighters on their nightly round, people walked past, did a double take, and turned back to gaze in wonder at a man up a ladder delicately polishing a pane of glass or winding an almost 150-year-old clockwork mechanism.

When Garry Usher was repairing central heating boilers for British Gas, and Iain Bell was the man to phone on the helpdesk if he got into difficulty, neither had the slightest idea that any gas lamps survived in London, still less that central streets including Cowley Street tucked in behind Westminster Abbey, the millionaire’s row of Kensington Palace Gardens, and a tiny courtyard, Pickering Place, where the last duel in London was fought, are still entirely lit by gas.

“To me,” Bell says, through careful manoeuvering, “it’s a beautiful quality of light, more mellow, far more attractive to me than the electrical.”

Garry Usher checks a gas lamp in Westminster. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Walking through Dean’s Yard, the open square within Westminster Abbey, which is entirely gas-lit, he says with a sigh: “When there was a power cut here a few weeks back, all you could see was the gas light with the darkness all around, a wonderful sight.”

Charles Dickens in 1838 described lamp lighters as a tribe apart, “clinging to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors”. In 1939 in Ghosts of London, HV Morton lamented their inevitable passing. “We’re the last of the old brigade,” one told him.

Now there are just five, supervised by Bell, to keep the lamps burning. Usher is the star who can repair anything, and makes lead fittings to hold the handmade glass when broken panes have to be replaced. “There’s nobody to touch him,” Bell says reverently, safely out of his hearing, “the man is a legend.”

There are more gas lamps on private land, and Hyde Park and the Palace of Westminster have their own teams. Bell and Usher are amused that they are not allowed into parliament on security grounds, but trot in and out of Buckingham Palace every other week – “We see the Queen quite often, she gives us a wave,” Usher says.

Usher, from east London, became a lamp lighter because he didn’t mind night work and, being a keen rugby player, wanted Saturdays off. Bell started out in Scotland and eventually moved south, steadily promoted by British Gas, until he learned to his surprise that these relics of 19th-century engineering genius had become his responsibility.

He is now a walking history of their development, pointing out lamp posts with the insignia of Queen Victoria, her uncle George IV and her grandson George V, supporting lanterns in Rochester or Windsor shapes. Most have been made taller to protect them from being walloped by vehicles much higher than the horse-drawn traffic they originally lit, and if they have a little door in the base they’re later replicas of the Victorian originals.



The earliest lamp lighters lit each by hand at dusk every night, and returned at dawn to extinguish them. Bell says that what saved the lamps from being written off when electricity arrived were the mantles made of silk coated in lime oxide, which made them much more efficient than a naked flame, and the clockwork lighting mechanism. Hundreds still run on their Victorian clockwork, and the rest on battery packs, but all still need attention at least once a fortnight to wind the clockwork or replace batteries and mantels.

In 1807 experimental lamps were specially installed in Pall Mall and lit to celebrate the birthday of George III in June 1807: they continued burning until midnight and people stood for hours staring at them in wonder. A plaque in Great Peter Street marks the site of the Gas Light and Coke Company, the gasworks that from 1813 lit Westminster Bridge and provided the first public supply in the world.

Bell says regional managers are often stunned to learn that more than 200 years later gas lamps still light some of the prettiest corners of London, and write asking for information. “I always tell them to come and see for themselves, and we take them on a little tour. They go away delighted. Spreading the word is the best way to keep them.”

When local residents and shopkeepers see Usher up a ladder near their premises, they tend to panic.

“People become terribly attached to them, and think their hour has finally come. They rush out pleading with me not to take them away. They are so relieved when I tell them my job is to keep the gas lamps burning forever.”