DW Windsor

At a very early stage in the refurbishment planning, we began work to prepare the upgrade to the Old Bridge’s ornate lighting, and new ornate lighting for the Esplanades.

Getting the lighting right is a key part of our preparation, both to ensure all the items meet our exacting specifications and – more importantly for the travelling public – to ensure the preparation of the lanterns and brackets does not hold up the rest of the refurbishment work. Additionally, the design of the lighting required careful planning to ensure enough time was available to develop the technical and aesthetic requirements, while gaining Listed Building Consent, before manufacture of all the lanterns.

To do this, Arcadis worked with DW Windsor, a British designer of outdoor lighting with a speciality in the use of LEDs – previous projects include work on Tower Bridge and Battersea Bridge.

We provided a list of lighting output characteristics the lanterns would need to produce and then DW Windsor got to work. This included producing prototype lanterns with various configurations of LEDs. These were then ‘photometrically tested’ to collect data on their lighting output. Arcadis then fed this ‘photometric data’ into lighting design software called Lighting Reality to determine whether the characteristics met our specification. This process was iterative – in basic terms this means repeating something, making it a bit better each time until you have a satisfactory result.

The Trust was impressed with the prototype lanterns produced by DW Windsor and these designs were successful in meeting the requirements of the Listed Building Consent.