In the dark of winter, Christmas is the perfect bright spark to bring light and joy to even the most curmudgeonly of people.
Even if you don’t get involved in the festive season, lights and decorations brighten up the darkest of nights and help take the chill out of the weather.
But all those lights come at a price, and we’re not talking in pounds: creating and installing festive lights generates carbon. Throw in the disruption of having to close a single lane of the New Bridge for that installation, and you’ve got another black mark against them.
Which is why from now on the Rochester Bridge Trust is doing things differently. Instead of installing Christmas lights on the New Bridge, we are using the enhancement lighting on the Old Bridge to mark the season.
This has the benefit of using a resource that is already in place and it means we mark the season on the bridge everyone notices, rather than the one everyone overlooks.