Situated in the Tower Hamlets docklands area of the old East End of London, the estate with its balconies, roof gardens, courtyards and traffic-free areas combined with new shops, schools, churches, community halls and a central market, was welcomed in this socially deprived area of London.
In September this year, an architectural conference was held at the Lansbury Estate to discuss the continuing need for urban regeneration. Jonathan Park and Max Maxwell from Studio Park were called in to light the estate and to end the Conference with a surprise event - ‘Let There be Light’ to show the 1951 architecture, faded by time and declining social conditions, in a ‘new light’.
As it was intended to be a ‘surprise’ and had only a limited budget, the lighting had to be supplied and installed (by Lighting Technology Projects) quickly and inexpensively. Studio Park took the colours and shapes of the famous Red, Blue and White flag and helmet logo of the 1951 exhibition as an overall concept, and set out to create new architectural lighting for some of the important buildings, to create a focal point and to ‘animate’ the entire estate with some dramatic and memorable lighting effects - with a total budget of just £25,000!
The lighting concentrated on the Market Square and St Mary & St Joseph’s Catholic Church - standing at the opposite ends of the estate. The three-storey housing façades were lit with 200W domestic ‘yard floodlights’ attached to the existing 1951 shop signs with the bay windows and shopping colonnade highlighted with blue ropelight. Across the market, the access balconies of the newer four-storey block were lit with red domestic ‘bulkhead’ lights and red ropelight.
The façade of the Catholic church was lit with a red spire over the blue and white of the building below and a mirror ball placed just below the cross to catch the laser beam. The lighting consisted of 14 400W and two 1.2kW discharge floodlights, drawing only 9kW, and powered directly from the church’s own fuseboard.
The main feature of the 1951 Market Square was its Clocktower, now long disused. Its stairway, a complex internal double helix, was lit in red and blue on alternate landings, again with 400W self-coloured discharge lamps reinforced with 70W lighting in the diamonds. The exterior was similarly illuminated with 400W floodlights on outriggers above head height for safety. Studio Park turned the Clocktower into a ‘Tower of Power’ by circling the clock faces with red ropelight and accentuating the hands with white UV paint and, as a pièce de résistance, placing a powerful 50W YAG laser and mirror ball at the top to send light beams to all corners of the Lansbury Estate.
The green YAG laser, supplied by Laser Grafix, reinforced by four SkyArt searchlights from Vari-Lite London, in a ring next to the covered market, animated the night sky from the moment the compère declared ‘Let there be Light’. The laser constantly changed from mapping out the area with 500m beams to the mirrorballs in the spires of the three important churches of the area, to illuminating the market square with thousands of shards of light from the Clocktower mirrorball, to outlining the shapes of the façade of St Mary & St Joseph’s church. The SkyArts swept the sky in choreographed, coloured sequences to proclaim the festival for miles around.
Project manager for the event was Julie Flavell, and all rigging services were supplied by Nippy Industries.
