Those who move residence from a town to the village of Bredfield are immediately struck by one thing after their first day of settling-in: “Gosh, isn’t it dark at night here!” Some people like it immediately, others find the dark streets disconcerting; but most come around to appreciating Bredfield’s dark night skies. Though street lighting can improve safety, there are three sound reasons, why the absence of street lighting is a good thing. Let’s examine these in turn.
Through its evolution, the Earth has witnessed many changes, but there has always been light days and dark nights. Increasingly, artificial lighting – street lighting, vehicle headlights, office building lights, oil flares, and so on – are brightening the night sky. With the increased use of LED lighting, nights are getting even brighter. We are losing the night and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, this is having a severe adverse impact on the natural world.
Night time LED street lighting 
Evening street lighting
Where the night is lit-up, it disorients migrating birds and disrupts their behaviour. Songbirds roosting around night lights have been found to be restless through the night, with metabolic changes that could indicate poorer health. Of fundamental importance is the hugely detrimental effect on insects. Light sources have direct lethal effects, but much more important is the way that light pollution changes the foraging behaviour of nocturnal insects, making it harder for them to find food, and alters the balance of ecosystems by assisting night-time predation. Light pollution can also affect plants. To take one example, artificial lighting has been linked with trees budding more than a week earlier. When the environment is taking a knocking from climate change, environment loss and chemical pollution, light pollution delivers another blow.
Where wildlife finds arable fields to be lacking in required food and shelter, village gardens – like those in Bredfield – provide a haven. If we had street lighting, then necessarily it would be close to gardens and its proximity would have a detrimental effect. Gardens would be less of a haven. Bredfield is not unique in its dark night skies and, considered as a whole, the unlit gardens and community green spaces of UK villages contribute a good few million acres of habitat preserved from light pollution.
Now it is time to turn to look at the other advantage of the absence of street lighting – the night sky. You don’t need to know the names of all the planets and constellations to appreciate a starry night. On a clear night, the night sky over Bredfield can provide quite a spectacle. You won’t see this spectacle in an area where the streets are lit.
Crescent Moon over Bredfield 
Moon, Venus & Jupiter aligned over Bredfield
We don’t need to go all ‘new-agey’ to appreciate that the sight of a starlit sky must have some positive psychological impact. Stargazing is certainly not a stressful activity – quite the opposite.
At the end of February 2023, the benefit of having dark skies took on a particularly dramatic significance, when the Aurora Borealis was visible from Bredfield. Almost certainly, this constituted a once in a life time opportunity. It wasn’t quite the swirling technicolour experience you might experience at the Arctic Circle, and the full effect wasn’t wholly visible to the naked eye, but it was there: a red and green sky to the north of the village. Luckily, Stephen Stammers managed to catch it on his camera. Here is his wonderful image:
Aurora Borealis over Bredfield – 27th February 2023
There is a third benefit to an absence of street lighting, that we ought to mention: better sleep. If you’re unlucky enough to have a street light outside your bedroom window, there’s a fair chance that it might interrupt your sleep patterns. Research has shown that “night time lights in our streets and cities are clearly linked with modifications in human sleep behaviours”.
So, if you hear any new residents complaining about the absence of street lighting in Bredfield, you know what to say to them!
For further reading see: Eklof, J. (2023) The Darkness Manifesto: Why the world needs the light
POST SCRIPT – MAY 2024
In this article, I said that having the Aurora Borealis visible from Bredfield was “almost certainly, a once in a life time opportunity”. Thankfully, this proved wrong and an even more spectacular display was viewable from Bredfield on 10th May, 2024. Several residents managed photos, including this spectacular image captured by Sophie Pope:
Northern Lights captured by Sophie Pope on 10th May 2024
