White band at amber light level on traffic lights - historical

[Ken H]

This pic was posted on Facebook. It Wellington Street in Leeds about 1960


But the point of this post is the traffic lights
The pole is painted with black and white stripes, and the amber level is also painted white
I sort of can remember this, but when were the stripes on traffic lights dispensed with?
I was 4 in 1960 so my memory is a little hazy but I am sure I remember the white bands.

 

[Speed43125]

This thread on sabre-roads has info on stripes on the poles themselves. Less sure on the stripe on the light cluster though.

old UK striped black and white posts - SABRE

www.sabre-roads.org.uk

 

[DelW]

Road signs in Britain were completely revamped in the mid-late 1960s. Pictograms replaced many of the old word-based signs, direction signs became lower case instead of upper case and with new colours, reflective materials were used, and many other changes, including the switch from black and white stripes to grey for sign poles including traffic signals.

Of course many old signs survived long after, and new signs were often mounted on old posts repainted grey. Near me there was an old upper case direction sign on an A road until about four or five years ago*, and only last week I noticed that a sign pole on a very minor road had lost almost all its grey paint to reveal black and white stripes underneath. They must have used good quality paint back then!

(Edit: having checked on Streetview, it was replaced between July 2015 and August 2016, but would still have been probably over 50 years old by then).

 

[Ediswan]

Of course many old signs survived long after

There is the odd relic still in place. If I read correctly, Edmonton UDC ceased to be in 1937:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.6...4!1sfOihO1rZuiZslQ6pz6PEsw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

 

[swt_passenger]

There is the odd relic still in place. If I read correctly, Edmonton UDC ceased to be in 1937:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.6...4!1sfOihO1rZuiZslQ6pz6PEsw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

AIUI Hampshire are still maintaining the cast finger posts in rural areas, mostly they’re on non-classified roads, and they still use the black and white paint scheme. I wonder if they were ever formally required to be removed?

But here‘s an example: (screen grab from Google Streetview of black and white direction finding finger post.)

Google Maps

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maps.app.goo.gl

 

[Ken H]

AIUI Hampshire are still maintaining the cast finger posts in rural areas, mostly they’re on non-classified roads, and they still use the black and white paint scheme. I wonder if they were ever formally required to be removed?

But here‘s an example:

View attachment 122339

Google Maps

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maps.app.goo.gl

Loads in Craven. All West Riding ones. They include the grid ref in the roundel at the top. This example is Austwick. Image from Google Street View

 

[whoosh]

I can remember traffic lights like that in Wood Green outside the tube station up until the late 1980s. They had 'STOP' etched on the red lenses.

 

[Snow1964]

Plenty of the old style cast finger post ones on minor roads (and some A roads) in Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset too. Those in BANES (Bath and North East Somerset) are still marked SCC presumably from Somerset county council days

There are still a few in Dorset painted red, the red is historic, but the significance is beyond this red, unlike black and white wartime blackout poles.

 

[AndrewE]

I would guess that the stripes date back to either the WW2 black-out or pea-souper fogs. Vehicle headlights and streetlights were were poor by modern standards (even before masking in the blackout) and stripes might well be an attempt to make them clearer to see.

 

[CharlieSpotted]

The striped poles still exist on the lights at the junction of Lichfield Street / Princes Street in Wolverhampton, the site of the first automatic traffic lights in Britain:

Google Maps

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www.google.com