Geraldine O’Farrell (left) and Caroline Cattini (right)
Together they’re responsible for the lighting at roughly 200 historical buildings and an estimated 400,000 lamps. Geraldine O’Farrell, senior building services engineer and Caroline Cattini, senior building services engineer and energy manager at English Heritage, talk about energy and lighting artefacts with Ben Cronin
Can you explain your different roles at English Heritage?
Geraldine O’Farrell: We’re both general engineers but I cover all aspects of building services and deal more with the casework outside – where we grant aid and work with churches and other historic buildings, advising them about heritage lighting. Custodians and owners come to us for advice. We offer free help and advice so people don’t end up ruining the property they’re trying to preserve. But I also have internal casework from our estate and our commercial side – our shops and visitor centres.
Caroline Cattini: I focus more on our own estate and the energy consumption of that because I’m also the energy manager.
So have you carried out any energy audits recently?
Caroline: We’ve focused on our own estate because we need to produce Display Energy Certificates. Our big users for energy are lighting and heating; heating is needed for conservation purposes, whereas the lighting usage comes mainly from display cases. We did have a high proportion of tungsten halogen lighting for our display lighting. We’ve got all sorts of artefacts in our own estate: not just oil paintings but watercolours, Roman remains, ceramics, miniatures, brasses – you name it we’ve got it. And then there are also our archeological stores and conservation stores [warehouses].
You say you “did have” a high proportion of tungsten halogen. Have you changed that now?
Caroline: A lot of our energy consumption comes from our archive in Swindon where we keep the nation’s collection of photographs. That uses an awful lot of energy. In all probability those larger buildings, like Dover Castle, Dover Tunnels and the archive, account for the greatest proportion our energy use. I don’t know how that is broken up into different lighting technologies because we don’t monitor that individually. It’s just from doing the audits of our larger properties that we knew a lot of that was tungsten. It’s not just energy, it’s also maintenance and how much changing the lamps costs the organisation. The plan has been that when those lights fail, they’ll be changed individually to either compact fluorescent lamps or LEDs, or even eco halogen lamps. The National Trust did a very successful trial in its Big Switch Campaign and developed those lamps with Philips, so if we can’t use LEDs, we normally use the Philips Eco Halogen lamps.
Do you deal with your maintenance internally or outsource it?
Caroline: We have a national maintenance contract with an external company so we are able to get an accurate idea of our maintenance costs. This allows us to give accurate maintenance projections when we make the business case for newer technologies.
It has recently been said that low-maintenance lamps and fittings reduce the risk of someone breaking an artefact or putting a ladder through a painting. Would that be a factor in your choice of technology?
Geraldine: Yes, that’s especially true where the paintings are very precious. For example, the paintings in Kenwood House (which include works by Rembrandt) are on loan and are so precious we have to get a specialist in to relamp. That means the maintenance costs at Kenwood are three times what they are at some of our other buildings, so the less we have to replace the lamps, the better.
What do you the people who live and work in the buildings think about LEDs when you have used them?
Geraldine: They had a lot of these old-fashioned bulkhead fittings when we did the major works at Dover Tunnels and the curators really wanted to put the old tungsten lamps back in. But nobody has noticed (when we used LEDs) that they were not the old-fashioned lamps. You’re pushing people out of their comfort zone when you say you can’t have your GLS lamps and tungsten any more, when you say they’re going to be phased out. There’s an awful lot of misinformation floating around about LEDs.
Like what?
Geraldine: Bad colour rendering…
Caroline: That they’re not going to last the expected life; that you’re not going to get the payback from them.
Geraldine: Everyone still seems to think they give a very cold blue light and that’s all you’re going to get from them. They just don’t seem to be aware of the recent developments.
Caroline: At Dover we put them in and they said, “This is what we’re actually trying to achieve with LEDs,” and we said “Actually, they’re already in”. They couldn’t pick out which was the LED and which wasn’t.
Geraldine: Their argument collapsed but they would have kept on believing it if we hadn’t ‘ambushed’ them.
Caroline: When we changed the lighting to LED in some of the English Heritage shops we noticed the chocolate wasn’t melting any more, which had been costing us a fortune. When people see it works we can roll it out to other shops in the estate, but it’s just getting that confidence.
Geraldine: Our maintenance and facilities managers are normally very happy – it makes their lives a lot easier.
What did you think about the erroneous press reports about LEDs damaging Van Gogh paintings? Do you have any painting that would equate to a Van Gogh and how do you light them?
Caroline: It did alarm us when we originally heard it. The nearest thing we have to a Van Gogh are the paintings in the Wellington Collection at Apsley House and the collection at Kenwood House. All the lighting at Kenwood was tungsten because our collection scientist was very cautious about changing anything to LED in case it did cause any damage to paintings. At Apsley House there is a mixture of fluorescent lights in the ceiling but the remainder of the lighting is tungsten. We’ve done some trials on LEDs for the lamp stands and chandeliers but tungsten has remained wherever the lighting is close to the painting. It’s a combination of the fact that we’re not ready to change to LEDs with paintings and that sometimes we can’t because we’d have to change the whole fitting – some of them don’t work with the LED lighting.
Geraldine: Sometimes the light is an integral part of the picture frame and the cost of altering that and putting in a new fitting is prohibitive.
Are there any objects or artefacts that are lit using LEDs?
Caroline: Yes, we’ve actually found that where we’ve lit artefacts with LEDs at Ranger’s House in Blackheath some of the colour rendering was better, depending on what the collection was inside. The ceramics didn’t look quite so good but it improved the appearance of the bronzes, so the curator was far happier.
How do you light a historical building or castle that was built before electric lighting was invented?
Geraldine: Everybody thinks if they’re lighting any sort of heritage building – a large proportion of which are churches in this country – they have to create this sort of faux Victoriana feel. But we very much encourage contemporary design and modern light fittings. They’re an honest addition to the internal ambience and decoration of the building; they say exactly what they are. A lot of churches will not have any remnants of their original light fittings, if they ever had anything. A lot of them just had candles; a lot of them still have additional gas fittings – anything that’s original from the time, or times past, we endeavor to keep, even if the building is medieval and what we’re trying to keep is Victorian. But we won’t add late 19th-century styles. It’s something I always come up against, this perception that you’ve got to have brass light switches and brass-type chandeliers and coach lamps.
We hear Stonehenge is going to have a new visitor centre. How are you going to approach the lighting there?
Geraldine: We have been able to use a lot of modern lighting at the new Stonehenge visitor centre and LEDs are going to feature quite a lot there. The centre is due to be finished late this year or early next year. Whatever is there in terms of lighting will remain but there’s not going to be any lighting of the stones. Dark skies are very important in that area, so it’s not going to look like Disneyland. Even the areas around the visitor centre are going to be kept very low key, with bollard-level lighting, that sort of thing. Light pollution is quite a hot topic within the organisation and we have quite a strong dark-sky policy.
