The End of Night

by Paul Bogard

  The effect, though, is subtle. If your objective is to light a football stadium, for example, you won’t be happy with gaslight. When electricity first came to European streetlights, the public realized just how subtle the gaslight they’d grown used to was. You get the sense that some observers felt as though they’d been tricked. Said one Londoner, “Gas lighting had no effect whatsoever on the brightness of the street; it was not turned on at all for three evenings and nobody noticed the least difference.” Said another, “as soon as we look away from the broad thoroughfare into one of the side streets, where a miserable, dim gaslight is flickering, the eye-strain begins. Here darkness reigns supreme, or rather, a weak, reddish glow, that is hardly enough to prevent collisions in the entrances of houses.… In a word, the most wretched light prevails.” You can’t blame nineteenth-century folks for feeling this way, and few of us today would willingly switch from electricity back to gas. But while we would never think to use gaslight to do the job of electric, we too often use electric lights to do the job of gas. You see this on Westminster Bridge, for example, where the lights seem far too bright, casting glare into the eyes of walkers, cyclists, and drivers. How much more beautiful would that bridge be if it were lit by flickering flames? And it’s not that when we overshadow the gaslight we haven’t a choice. If gaslight were deemed not bright enough for pedestrians, then waist-high, well-shielded electric lights could easily provide any walker the safety he or she needed while still allowing for the ambience created by the gaslights. Seeing London’s gas lamps amid the city’s already bright night raises the question of how we might genuinely appreciate all the benefits of electric light while at the same time avoiding what Stevenson called “that ugly blinding glare.” In the face of such ugliness, he argued, “a man need not be very… epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed.”

  Stevenson wrote “A Plea for Gas Lamps” near the end of the nineteenth century, when arc lights were increasingly in use in Europe and the United States and the writing was clearly on the wall for gas lamps. His was not a tirade “against light” in general but rather a caution against what he saw as the uncontrolled, uncomfortable brilliance of the new electric lights. He wrote with admiration about how, with the coming of the “gas stars” in the streets, those streets were better places, and the lamplighters were good people, even if every once in a while, “an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary.” (I ask Gary about that. “Try not to,” he says.) But now, with electric light, these lamplighters and their lights were to be replaced by “tame stars” that “are to come out… not one by one, but all in a body and at once,” that is, with the flick of a switch. While wanting to “accept beauty where it comes,” Stevenson cautioned against what he saw as “a new sort of urban star… horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

  The technology we use to illuminate our nights has come a long way from those first arc lights, but I wonder if Stevenson’s caution to us might be the same: While light at night is welcome, can there be such a thing as too much? In doing away with darkness, what beauty do we lose?

  For hundreds of years this city was dark or nearly so, and I want to see if I can find more of that old London and the beauty it hides. I’ve chosen an old hotel in an old part of town where I can come and go by foot at any hour. For it’s walking I have in mind, in the middle of the night, with Charles Dickens.

  In “Night Walks” (1861), Dickens wrote, “Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep… caused me to walk about the streets all night.” Dickens had walked “at half-past twelve” during the “damp, cloudy, and cold” London winter, figuring that with the sun not rising until half-past five, he had plenty of time to explore. I have come to London in winter as well, during the longest nights of the year, and when I wake at 2:20 a.m., I can’t help but smile.

  I dress warmly but go unarmed and without light—no flashlight, no headlamp, no torch. The hotel has some five hundred rooms, most booked, but none of my fellow guests join me as I trot down the stairs from the fifth floor. The hallways and stairs are as bright as in every hotel in the world and will remain that way through this middle of the night, this lost time after 1:30 a.m. until maybe 4:00 that feels more like yesterday and not yet tomorrow. In the lobby, I see no one but a custodian vacuuming near the front door’s sliding glass. He doesn’t see me until I’m almost to the door, then offers a look of What? You’re going out there?

  I’m first on the Strand—one of London’s oldest and most well-known streets, on a cold December night, maybe 25 degrees—and then alone on Waterloo Bridge at quarter to three. West down the Thames, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament stand dark against the gray charcoal London sky. Big Ben’s round white face stands lit, as does the blue London Eye, the Ferris wheel on the river’s south bank. Above, I count twenty-four stars. Behind, looking east, amid apparent smoke and steam, the unlit silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the view a close copy of the famous photograph from the Blitz. That is, except for the skyscrapers going in behind, and the intense white lights off Blackfriars Bridge coming straight into my eyes.

  Dickens describes the Thames as having “an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected light seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the specters of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.” The river has claimed countless lives over the centuries, including those of eighteenth-century slaves jumping overboard to avoid their fate and six hundred passengers drowned in a paddle steamer sinking in 1878. I walk down the stony bank to the edge of the black water, the Thames feeling up close like a still wild presence at the heart of the frantic modern city. Tugs and barges and boats lie anchored, a yellow light in one illuminating a man coiling rope. Though the river still sees activity from police boats, fireboats, boats used by tourism companies, and—most significantly—barges used for civil engineering projects, times are changing quickly for the men who work on those barges that ply the Thames at night. In Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu quotes a man who remembered that, when he was a child, “there were so many boats on the Thames that it was possible to skip from boat to boat all the way from one side of the river to the other without getting wet.” These bargers, Sandhu writes, now “move through a river that appears to them to have been razed and colonized by outside forces, its soul abducted.” Sandhu argues that while “Londoners take the Thames for granted… the bargers, especially after midnight, feel as though they have been unshackled from the city, its soot and heaviness, its noise and overbearing solidity. They breathe in the fumes of freedom, bathe in the tranquillity of the dark waters through which they gently move.” It wasn’t long ago, says Sandhu, that “the nocturnal river was swathed in darkness; now, even at its farthest reaches, car parks and grand shopping complexes are sprouting up, their light leaking out onto the Thames and denting its darkness.”

  Back west past Waterloo Bridge, I pass through an arcade of shops that was packed when I ran through this morning, my path a zigzag splash through puddles and past thick coats and couples and three-generation families. The embankments—this south side called “the Albert” and the north side called “the Victoria”—were built in the nineteenth century to control flooding by forcing the Thames to keep a set path rather than continuing its ancient seasonal weave. Now, this south bank is utterly deserted but absolutely lit. The only people I see are one security guard and one garbage collector. I make my way up and over Westminster Bridge, continuing along the South Bank toward Lambeth Bridge, looking across at Parliament. Until midnight, amber floodlights illuminate the Houses of Parliament, but in the middle of a winter’s Sunday night, the old building stands dark from tip to tail. No lights in the windows, steam from only one among the many chimneys. With the clouds behind lit by streetlight glow, the building and towers stand in silhouette as though lit by moonlight centuries ago.

  Dickens writes of crossing over
Westminster Bridge and visiting the abbey, where he sensed “a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark arches and pillars.” I feel the same way looking across the river at Parliament. By daylight, even floodlit, this is an old building in the present, but with its floodlight makeup removed, and placed in silhouette against the winter’s sky, centuries fade and shadows come alive. Looking across the water, I imagine its ghosts coming down to the rooftop of the building in which they once walked. Whether you’re in London or in the countryside or in your own bedroom, turning out the lights—especially the electric lights—can take you back in time.

  From Westminster I walk to the corner of St. James’s Park and around its curving boundary on Horse Guards Road, behind the Cabinet War Rooms and No. 10 Downing Street, crossing over The Mall and jogging up the steps past an enormous granite column topped by the bronze statue of a tremendously resolute Duke of York, and stop on Carlton House Terrace. If you want to see a street lit by gaslight, this is a good one—with no electric lamps in the way, the gas illuminates the street in soft golden flare. I continue on to Pall Mall and take a right down this famous old street, past rows of distinguished buildings, an open second-story window revealing a wall of ancient books—brown, crimson, black at the spine—and two third-story windows, drapes drawn, dim glow behind.

  I think of Virginia Woolf and her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” from 1927, in which she claims “the greatest pleasure of town life in winter” is “rambling the streets of London.” Her story tells of using the excuse of needing to buy a pencil in order to get out and walk. “The hour should be the evening and the season winter,” she says, because “the evening hour… gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.” By irresponsibility, I like to think she means freedom. “How beautiful a London street is then,” she writes, “with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness.”

  I would like to have seen that London or, better yet, to see a modern London with “long groves of darkness” blooming with subtle “islands of light.” Some eighty-five years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, her equation has been reversed. Now, long groves of electric light give way only periodically to pockets of gaslit beauty or darkness. My visit here is the first time I experience a feeling that I’ll have in several other cities and towns, especially in Europe, so rich with centuries of built history: how much more beautiful the nights could be here if more attention were paid to light and darkness. It’s not that the London lighting doesn’t have its moments—Parliament from across the Thames, for example—but in general the lighting relies on floodlights plastered against building walls, with the result a somewhat patchy appearance, especially compared to the subtle and more uniform lighting I will see in Paris. The opportunities for creating and enhancing the beauty of London at night are enormous—its gaslights and human history give it such an advantage over most cities in world—but for now these opportunities remain, for the most part, unrealized.

  From Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square by 3:55, the “look right, look left” painted at intersection crossings, the black cabs slowing by, a row of sleeping red double-decker buses, Admiral Nelson immortalized with spotlights. Then, once again, the Strand. And lastly, Covent Garden.

  This was the old market of London for hundreds of years, first outside the city walls, then at the city’s edge. Dickens closes his essay by visiting “Covent-garden Market” which he finds on market morning “wonderful company. The great wagons of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party.” The sense of a party in Covent Garden has a long history. An engraving from 1735 titled “Drunken Rakes and Watchmen in Covent Garden” features said rakes in tricorner hats, with swords drawn, their arms around ladies. A dog barks in the corner, lanterns lie smashed on cobblestones, the watchmen enter with their staffs a-swinging, giving one rake a serious kick in the behind, while a lady plugs her man’s nose, and two link boys—who before gaslight “linked” travelers in the street from one lighted location to the next—stand holding their flames in the corner, clearly amused by ridiculous adults. What’s interesting, aside from the crazy scene, is that in the background, modern-day Covent Garden is clear. Beyond the swooning face of a petticoated dame, you almost expect, if you look closely enough, to see the Apple Store logo in the shop window under the colonnade. The church with the clock, the clock tower, the passages, the cobblestones, they’re all here. The description states, “He and his drunken companions raise a riot in Covent Garden,” and funny enough, 275 years later, at just past 4:00 a.m., he and his drunken companions are still here, bellowing about Chelsea football as they lead each other, arms on shoulders, from the last pub to the next.

  On the square itself, the gaslight still burns. But several shops are lit so brightly, either window displays or entire interiors, that electric light gushes into the square, flooding the night. To see how lovely Covent Garden used to be, stroll the side streets, Crown Court or Broad Court: gaslight and cobblestones, five-hundred-year-old buildings set close across from one another.

  In Covent Garden Market now, night is still here, but morning is coming fast. It’s time to walk back to the Strand, to my bed and sleep, and I have a strong feeling that when I return in a few hours the scene here will be changed. Back will be the shopping throngs, cups from Caffè Nero in one hand and shopping bags in the other, gone the ghosts of farmers, their cabbages, their dogs.

  A gas lamplighter in the Parisian darkness of the 1930s as captured by the photographer Brassaï. (© The Brassaï Estate—RMN)

  A few nights later, I am standing on Île St.-Louis, in the center of old Paris, watching the pale peach glow from nineteenth-century lamps on a bridge over the Seine, the waxing crescent moon rising in a powder-blue lavender sky.

  There are many bright cities, but only one City of Light, La Ville-Lumière. These days the city’s nickname is often translated as “the city of lights,” and with good reason, for the lighting of Paris is certainly part of its charm and identity. But if loads of electric light were all it took for a city to be called the City of Light, dozens of cities around the world would be well positioned to steal the title. We don’t know the exact origin of the phrase, but we do know it refers to Paris’s being the center of the eighteenth-century philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. That is, the name City of Light has as much to do with new ways of thinking as it does with impressive artificial light.

  It turns out that is still the case.

  “Very little about this light is spontaneous,” says David Downie, an American expatriate and author of the wonderful Paris, Paris, who has joined me for a walk through the old city. “It’s all studied. Since 1900, they’ve consciously cultivated their image. Paris was really the first to pioneer this concept of a light identity. Of using light to create an atmosphere.” Downie points to the lamps glowing on the short bridge from Île St.-Louis to Île de la Cité. “See the light fixture? It’s a pre-1890s gas model with a little chimney, on a footbridge from the 1960s: That’s what it’s all about. They’re playing not just with light but with shadow. The darker it gets, the better this bridge looks.” While few would notice this bridge during the day, at night the lighting highlights the beautiful shadow-play on the bridge’s underside. “There are a lot of little details that come out at night,” Downie says. “They’re very careful to make the light just strong enough so that you’re not going to trip, but they’ve understood that they can’t blind you. Here, they’ve created a nostalgic, old-fashioned feel with a warm blanket of light.”

  One feature of the lighting in old Paris is that there are few streetlights higher than fifteen meters, essentially no lights much above the first floor. The sidewalks and streets and balconies are lit, but above that the buildings fade toward darkness. “This was all studied; they want it to be this way,” Downie explains. “The goal here is to create atmosphere, and t
he darker it gets, the more atmospheric it becomes.”

  As darkness collects between the buildings, along the Seine, on the rooftops, French doors, and balconies, rising around gold lamplight on the ancient narrow streets of these islands where the city was born, there is an intimacy, an openness—anyone can walk these islands, stand on these bridges, wander through this history, as though the city at night is a dinner party in a wonderful old house full of endlessly accessible rooms. The fromagerie, a little bell on the door and soft cheese white paper–wrapped, the boucherie windows full of twisted-neck fowl with feathered heads still attached, the Berthillon ice cream shop sending its small cones out into the night like messengers. Pipe organ notes sift through heavy, centuries-old wooden church doors, faux wicker-backed café chairs huddle around espresso-topped tables, a ribbon of moonlight ripples on the Seine’s silver skin as it flows under bridges lit yellow-gold marching west toward the sea.

  “This is the beauty of the night, a beauty ‘rooted in atmosphere’ that is not easily explained,” explains Joachim Schlör in Nights in the Big City. “I start my nocturnal walk with pleasure, and my pulse beats slower in this pleasant darkness.”

  Walking and old Paris go together hand in glove, one reason so many Americans—used to cities enslaved to the automobile—revel in visiting the French capital. Recently the notion of the flâneur has gained popularity, one who appreciates, Schlör says, “the fine art of walking through a city slowly and attentively, one’s appreciation bolstered by learning.” But in Paris this walking happens not only during the day. In the noctambule, a word that in its English form, noctambulist, means sleepwalker but in French has a meaning closer to night owl, we find one who takes pleasure walking at night. The name was first applied to those Parisians who took advantage of the newly gaslit boulevards of the 1830s and 1840s, but for Downie, the quintessential noctambule is the eighteenth-century writer Rétif de la Bretonne. In terms of writing about walking at night, Bretonne paved the way, created the path. Downie often will follow Bretonne’s old route as he walks around the edge of Île St.-Louis. “Bretonne lived right over there.” Downie points. “He’d come out and walk the same way we’re walking. He’d sit out at the end of the island and think great thoughts, and then go have his nighttime adventures.”