The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

wretched light prevails.” You can’t blame nineteenth-century folks for feeling this way, and few of us today would willingly switch from electricity back to gas. But while we would never think to use gaslight to do the job of electric, we too often use electric lights to do the job of gas. You see this on Westminster Bridge, for example, where the lights seem far too bright, casting glare into the eyes of walkers, cyclists, and drivers. How much more beautiful would that bridge be if it were lit by flickering flames? And it’s not that when we overshadow the gaslight we haven’t a choice. If gaslight were deemed not bright enough for pedestrians, then waist-high, well-shielded electric lights could easily provide any walker the safety he or she needed while still allowing for the ambience created by the gaslights. Seeing London’s gas lamps amid the city’s already bright night raises the question of how we might genuinely appreciate all the benefits of electric light while at the same time avoiding what Stevenson called “that ugly blinding glare.” In the face of such ugliness, he argued, “a man need not be very … epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed.”

      Stevenson wrote “A Plea for Gas Lamps” near the end of the nineteenth century, when arc lights were increasingly in use in Europe and the United States and the writing was clearly on the wall for gas lamps. His was not a tirade “against light” in general but rather a caution against what he saw as the uncontrolled, uncomfortable brilliance of the new electric lights. He wrote with admiration about how, with the coming of the “gas stars” in the streets, those streets were better places, and the lamplighters were good people, even if every once in a while, “an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary.” (I ask Gary about that. “Try not to,” he says.) But now, with electric light, these lamplighters and their lights were to be replaced by “tame stars” that “are to come out … not one by one, but all in a body and at once,” that is, with the flick of a switch. While wanting to “accept beauty where it comes,” Stevenson cautioned against what he saw as “a new sort of urban star … horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

      The technology we use to illuminate our nights has come a long way from those first arc lights, but I wonder if Stevenson’s caution to us might be the same: While light at night is welcome, can there be such a thing as too much? In doing away with darkness, what beauty do we lose?

      For hundreds of years this city was dark or nearly so, and I want to see if I can find more of that old London and the beauty it hides. I’ve chosen an old hotel in an old part of town where I can come and go by foot at any hour. For it’s walking I have in mind, in the middle of the night, with Charles Dickens.

      In “Night Walks” (1861), Dickens wrote, “Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep … caused me to walk about the streets all night.” Dickens had walked “at half-past twelve” during the “damp, cloudy, and cold” London winter, figuring that with the sun not rising until half-past five, he had plenty of time to explore. I have come to London in winter as well, during the longest nights of the year, and when I wake at 2:20 a.m., I can’t help but smile.

      I dress warmly but go unarmed and without light—no flashlight, no headlamp, no torch. The hotel has some five hundred rooms, most booked, but none of my fellow guests join me as I trot down the stairs from the fifth floor. The hallways and stairs are as bright as in every hotel in the world and will remain that way through this middle of the night, this lost time after 1:30 a.m. until maybe 4:00 that feels more like yesterday and not yet tomorrow. In the lobby, I see no one but a custodian vacuuming near the front door’s sliding glass. He doesn’t see me until I’m almost to the door, then offers a look of What? You’re going out there?

      I’m first on the Strand—one of London’s oldest and most well-known streets, on a cold December night, maybe 25 degrees—and then alone on Waterloo Bridge at quarter to three. West down the Thames, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament stand dark against the gray charcoal London sky. Big Ben’s round white face stands lit, as does the blue London Eye, the Ferris wheel on the river’s south bank. Above, I count twenty-four stars. Behind, looking east, amid apparent smoke and steam, the unlit silhouette of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the view a close copy of the famous photograph from the Blitz. That is, except for the skyscrapers going in behind, and the intense white lights off Blackfriars Bridge coming straight into my eyes.

      Dickens describes the Thames as having “an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected light seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the specters of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.” The river has claimed countless lives over the centuries, including those of eighteenth-century slaves jumping overboard to avoid their fate and six hundred passengers drowned in a paddle steamer sinking in 1878. I walk down the stony bank to the edge of the black water, the Thames feeling up close like a still wild presence at the heart of the frantic modern city. Tugs and barges and boats lie anchored, a yellow light in one illuminating a man coiling rope. Though the river still sees activity from police boats, fireboats, boats used by tourism companies, and—most significantly—barges used for civil engineering projects, times are changing quickly for the men who work on those barges that ply the Thames at night. In Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu quotes a man who remembered that, when he was a child, “there were so many boats on the Thames that it was possible to skip from boat to boat all the way from one side of the river to the other without getting wet.” These bargers, Sandhu writes, now “move through a river that appears to them to have been razed and colonized by outside forces, its soul abducted.” Sandhu argues that while “Londoners take the Thames for granted … the bargers, especially after midnight, feel as though they have been unshackled from the city, its soot and heaviness, its noise and overbearing solidity. They breathe in the fumes of freedom, bathe in the tranquillity of the dark waters through which they gently move.” It wasn’t long ago, says Sandhu, that “the nocturnal river was swathed in darkness; now, even at its farthest reaches, car parks and grand shopping complexes are sprouting up, their light leaking out onto the Thames and denting its darkness.”

      Back west past Waterloo Bridge, I pass through an arcade of shops that was packed when I ran through this morning, my path a zigzag splash through puddles and past thick coats and couples and three-generation families. The embankments—this south side called “the Albert” and the north side called “the Victoria”—were built in the nineteenth century to control flooding by forcing the Thames to keep a set path rather than continuing its ancient seasonal weave. Now, this south bank is utterly deserted but absolutely lit. The only people I see are one security guard and one garbage collector. I make my way up and over Westminster Bridge, continuing along the South Bank toward Lambeth Bridge, looking across at Parliament. Until midnight, amber floodlights illuminate the Houses of Parliament, but in the middle of a winter’s Sunday night, the old building stands dark from tip to tail. No lights in the windows, steam from only one among the many chimneys. With the clouds behind lit by streetlight glow, the building and towers stand in silhouette as though lit by moonlight centuries ago.

      Dickens writes of crossing over Westminster Bridge and visiting the abbey, where he sensed “a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark arches and pillars.” I feel the same way looking across the river at Parliament. By daylight, even floodlit, this is an old building in the present, but with its floodlight makeup removed, and placed in silhouette against the winter’s sky, centuries fade and shadows come alive. Looking across the water, I imagine its ghosts coming down to the rooftop of the building in which they once walked. Whether you’re in London or in the countryside or in your own bedroom, turning out the lights—especially the electric lights—can take you back in time.

      From Westminster I walk to the corner of St. James’s Park and around its curving boundary on Horse Guards Road, behind the Cabinet War Rooms and No. 10 Downing Street, crossing over The Mall and jogging up the steps past an enormous granite column topped by the bronze statue of a tremendously resolute Duke of York, and stop on Carlton House Terrace. If you want to see a street lit by gaslight, this is a good one—with no electric lamps in the way, the gas illuminates the street in soft golden flare. I continue on to Pall Mall and take a right down this famous old street, past rows of distinguished buildings, an open second-story window revealing a wall of ancient books—brown, crimson, black