Backed by residents across the borough, we’ve been leading a campaign to get shops, restaurants and offices to switch off their lights after working hours. Having surveyed the stretch between the Angel and Screen on the Green (including the N1 Centre) we calculate that some 400,000 Kwh are being used to generate “post-business” lighting annually - that’s enough to boil seven million cups of tea! Producing that much electricity is resulting in about 200 tonnes of Co2 being pumped into the atmosphere - and we all know what that means.

Uneccessary night time lighting also contributes to light Pollution - diminishing everyone’s enjoyment of the natural night sky. The Home Office has come to the conclusion that such lighting has zero efect on reducing crime - studies in the US and Australia suggest that nightime lighting may even increase crime. So it’s time to switch off, and we’ve taken the message to Foxtons (12 tonnes of C02 per year) and Borders (a whopping 50 tonnes!), who’ve agreed to “review their lighting policy”.

Over 630 people signed our “switch off” petition between September and November, and we were backed by the Islington Gazette in our efforts to get something done in 2008. We have been pressing the Islington Business Improvement District (BID) coalition to make this a plank of their strategy. However, so far it seems (as it were) that a light is on… but no-one’s home.