The Douro is a luminaire ideally suited for town centre lighting schemes. With its clean, simple lines and high quality photometric performance, it offers the user a long lasting and effective solution.

It is being used to good effect in Sutton, on an important high street redevelopment scheme.

Paul Dillon, Street Lighting Manager with the London Borough of Sutton, said, “this lighting scheme was part of a wider £3.2m re-development of Sutton High Street, which serves over 400 retail units. The aim was to install a lighting solution to reduce crime, make the street feel safer at night and minimise street clutter.”

East Architecture landscape urban design was appointed to design the new public realm, in consultation with the Sutton Town Centre Partnership. This design brief included the street lighting, paving, street furniture and feature lighting.

East worked together with Urbis to adapt the design of their Douro lantern to suit this particular project. Urbis also fitted the specially designed luminaires with frameless flat glass protectors to provide a compact, clean shape.

Once the design and technical specification of the luminaire was formalised, the project team then went through a consultation process to ensure it would meet the needs of all the stakeholders affected by the re-development. This revealed that the Douro was well received.

Paul stated, “Urbis supplied the luminaires fitted with a twin optic, equipped with 140W and 90W Cosmo lamps. This set up delivers a high level of uniformity along the High Street and the clean white light provides better facial recognition for pedestrians. Using a twin optic also gives us the option of switching off the 90W lamps during the quieter night time hours.”

The Douros are mainly mounted on 8m tapered Columns, which are laid out in straight lines against the slope of the street. Urbis also manufactured the Columns to differing heights to accommodate ground undulations along the High Street. In a number of places the Douros are mounted on wall Brackets to reduce clutter, which helps to visually open up the High Street.

Another interesting aspect to the scheme is the use of Urbis’ specially designed LED spotlights, which are mounted at a height of 3m on a number of the Columns. These provide feature lighting to highlight trees, stages and buildings.

Paul commented, “the Douro really does blend into the high street environment and the quality of white light produced is an improvement on the previous SON lighting. We have also achieved our aim of ensuring that we made this new scheme as energy efficient as possible, within the set lighting criteria.”

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