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Pedestrian Crossings

You are here: Home - Histories - Pedestrian Crossings - Black and white and walked all over

In recent years, the introduction of new types of pedestrian crossing - particularly the controversial puffin, which detects the presence of people and vehicles to calculate the right crossing time - has been the cause of much public debate. But concern over how to get people over the road has been a source of discussion since the motor car first started to jostle Britain's pedestrians for roadspace. Has anything really changed?

This feature looks into the development of British pedestrian facilities - from the humble zebra crossing through to the trusty pelican. It's a more interesting story than you might think - and there's a chance to have a go at some of the different types of crossing along the way.

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Black and white and walked all over

Zebra crossings - the only type of uncontrolled crossing used in Britain - have their roots in pre-war days, when then Transport Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha introduced the practice of marking crossing places with orange beacons on top of striped poles. Motorists were expected to stop for people wishing to cross the road when they came across the new signs, which quickly became known (officially as well as to the public) as Belisha Beacons.

This type of crossing didn't develop any further than a pair of orange globes until October 1951, when the Ministry reacted to complaints that the crossings weren't sufficiently visible by ordering that they should have thick white stripes painted across the road to leave motorists in no doubt. Because they now had a set of black and white stripes on the road to match the ones on the Belisha Beacon poles, they were renamed Zebra Crossings, starting a long tradition of naming new crossings after animals. At the same time scores of these crossings were decommissioned to give them more impact where they were really needed.

Striped road markings on a Zebra Crossing

The Ministry was duly praised for its efforts and, in the short term, accidents at the crossings fell dramatically. But as the winter went on, the problem became worse - simply because motorists assumed that crossings would be highly visible and were unable to see the stripes in darkness. The problem was made worse by the long nights and wet weather that winter. Accidents were getting worse again.

The Transport Minister, JR Willis, complained to his aides that he had (literally, as it happens) been painted into a corner - their measures to improve crossing safety had worked in the day and not at night, and their only course was to spend even more money to make them safe after dark. At that time, the Belisha Beacon was just a glass ball on a pole and the Ministry considered floodlighting the crossings before it settled on the idea of making the beacons light up somehow.

It was in June 1952 (a whole month after funding had been sought from Treasury) that the Ministry started looking into a way to illuminate the crossings, as a matter of some urgency - not so much to prevent more accidents, rather to avoid the bad publicity generated by another winter of accidents on darkened crossings. There was a hope that if a solution could be found, it might be installed on all 12,000 crossings nationwide by the end of October. Never has a government ministry acted so fast!

Minutes of meetings held by Willis that summer show that, in their desperation for the quickest possible solution, they were willing to accept steady lights - because nothing was available cheaply and in sufficient numbers to make them flash - and for them to be lit all day as well as all night to avoid paying for time switches. Even so, at £35 to fit lights to a pair of Belisha Beacons, plus the cost of the 5,000 crossings with three or more beacons, it was set to cost the government £520,000. It was the only option to avoid the PR disaster that was looming around the corner.

Progress was not as fast as they might have liked, but in October 1952 a flashing mechanism was eventually sourced that could be produced in the tens of thousands. It was to be manufactured by a firm of clockmakers. The announcement that the Belisha Beacons were to be made to flash caused a sudden outcry: the Town Clerk of Croydon had to be reassured that no restrictions would be necessary on shop window lights, presumably due to the concern that any other flashing lights nearby would have to be removed. Various letters were written to editors, mostly about the visual amenity of filling town centres with flashing lights, but some with greater concerns: one person complained bitterly that a flashing light would cause radio interference and a group together might cause interference over "a whole district"! The thought that one Zebra Crossing might put radio receivers on the blink across half the town centre is quite comical, but apparently it was a widely held concern at the time.

By December 1952 progress was being made only slowly, though the various traffic equipment manufacturers of the day (including Revo, Forest City and others) had drawn up designs for the new beacons incorporating the clockmaker's flashing mechanism, and they were ready to be commissioned. Production en masse started in January 1953, but the cost of fitting out a single beacon had risen to £80 and some local authorities were unwilling to spend their share of the money.

Chichester wrote to inform the Minister in no uncertain terms that they would be illuminating their beacons, but not making them flash, thank you very much. The Ministry could do nothing because flashing lights had been introduced too late to go in the regulations. Westminster (embarassingly responsible for the Zebra Crossings surrounding the Ministry) threw out the idea of making its 103 beacons flash on the 19th December. Councillor Mervyn Griffiths Jones spoke for many when he said:

The Ministry didn't really know how best to deal with them anyway. Because the beacons on opposite sides of the road were run from different electricity supplies - there being a power line down both sides of the road for streetlighting - every beacon had its own flasher. At first their advice was to have all beacons flashing at different rates to make them more visible. When this caused grumbling, they changed their advice to having beacons on each crossing flashing in time, but where several crossings were visible at once, the crossings should flash out of step with each other to differentiate between them. Then for no good reason they decided that they might as well all go in time to improve the look of the thing, as motorists were having no trouble differentiating between different crossings. All of this meant synchronising individual beacons' flashers with each other. Council engineers across Britain must have been earning a fortune on overtime.

Aside from minor teething problems - such as the special permission granted to Weymouth in 1954 because the flashing beacons on its seafront were declared a hazard to shipping - this is the Zebra Crossing as we know it: little more than a panic solution and a face-saving exercise.

The one major development since 1953 has been illuminating the white stripes of the Belisha Beacon, which has been increasingly common since the late 1990s. It might come as a surprise, then, that a company called SRS made the first prototype of these in June 1962. They didn't impress the Ministry, but they were trialled outside the King Henry VIII school in Coventry and outside the Dog and Gun pub on the A64 in Leeds. There's no record of how long they lasted and the idea then vanished without trace until the 1990s.

Nick Booth adds:

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