2 Redwell Street - Haywards pavement lights

Image: © Evelyn Simak Taken: 25 Aug 2019

Pavement lights are prisms set into a pavement or road, allowing light to penetrate and hence illuminate a room or a cellar beneath. Pavement lights were originally set in iron frames, often marked with the name of the foundry and prisms were used instead of flat glass to disperse the light, diffusing it over a large area. For a wider view of this location see > https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6248454. Hayward Brothers & Eckstein were a London company making patent pavement lights for basements under urban streets. Due to anti-German sentiment during WW1 the English-born William Eckstein changed his name to Extone, and the company's name became Haywards Ltd Extone. In 1848, glaziers William and Edward Hayward joined with an ironmonger specialising in coal-hole lids, thus uniting the two components of their future iron-framed cellar windows. Their major coup was to invent and patent in 1871 a type of horizontal window, glazed with an obliquely-cut lens or prism, which bent incoming light through 90 degrees. Set into a pavement, this could be used to provide daylight in cellars, increasing the usable space in a building. About 1891, William MacLean, a wholesale glass merchant in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, became the Scottish agent for Hayward Brothers & Eckstein. The Montrose-born DW McInnes, then the London manager of the Carron Iron Company, joined Haywards in 1896, and in 1899, they supplied the floor lights for the Port Dundas Electric Power Station for Glasgow Corporation Tramways.

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