Ely Cathedral, located in the picturesque city of Ely in East Cambridgeshire, can be dated back to AD 763, when it began its life as an abbey church built by St Etheldreda. The current building dates from 1083, and Ely was raised to cathedral status in 1109.
As well as upgrading to a more energy-efficient and sustainable lighting system to help achieve the Church of England’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2030, the lighting design was required to accentuate the cathedral’s stunning architectural features and utilise light to reflect the building’s importance as a place of worship.
The Cathedral is also an important heritage attraction, a venue for music and events, and an occasional location for filming. It was therefore key to ensure that any new lighting scheme was capable of showing the architecture off to its full potential, while supporting a range of uses and enhancing the Cathedral’s daily round of worship.
The brief was that the new lighting system should aim to reveal more of the detail and beauty of the building while being less visually intrusive.
Bathing the building in traditional white light was the primary focus, but while replacing the existing lighting scheme with modern fixtures and control, it is possible to incorporate an innovative, dynamic colour-changing scheme that can be used when appropriate to mark specific occasions and celebrations for the local community. As with all heritage projects, the treatment of lighting design has to be handled with sensitivity and care.
By updating the lighting fixtures to modern, low-power products, the expectation is to be more energy efficient, reducing energy costs as well as energy consumption and carbon emissions, to aid with the cathedral’s sustainability goal of reaching carbon net zero by 2030.
The end result of the lighting design should be to secure Ely Cathedral as an iconic landmark in Cambridgeshire, and as an inspirational showcase of architecture used as a backdrop for events and filming for now and the future.
Light Perceptions, which provides a highly specialised lighting design service for historic buildings, was appointed to deliver a new lighting system to replace the exterior lighting at the cathedral. In accordance with the carefully considered lighting brief, Pharos Architectural Controls was selected by Light Perceptions to bring the project to life. The lighting design has delivered a future-proofed lighting solution that ensures the cathedral continues to shine for years to come.
Pharos Cloud, which offers simple and secure lighting installation control and management remotely from any PC, tablet or mobile, any time and from anywhere is used to control the external lighting scheme remotely. Featuring a highly adaptable online scheduler, Pharos Cloud also enables lighting to be programmed for just the right moment and updated by users with ease, making it the perfect solution for Lincoln Cathedral, which requires versatile lighting to deliver a variety of colour options when lighting the towers in recognition of local, national and international events.
The installation uses a dynamic lighting control system, the Pharos Designer LPC 2 (Lighting Playback Controller 2), connected to Pharos Cloud, which supports two universes of the DMX lighting protocol, and is networked to seventeen Pharos Designer RIO D (Remote Input Output DALI) devices, which provide a remote and scalable way to control all the DALI fixtures and ballasts. Each RIO D supports a single DALI bus, which is used as an output for control and as an input for triggering, allowing the cathedral to be flexibly lit in beautiful, colourful lighting scenes.
Five Pharos Designer TPS (Touch Panel Station) screens have been integrated into the scheme to provide users with a customised interface to trigger and adjust scenes, timelines, and overrides. It was essential for the cathedral’s new lighting to reap the benefits of LED technology to ensure the lighting was more environmentally friendly, had a longer working life, and required considerably less maintenance.
Lighting fixture manufacturers Meyer, iGuzzini and Studio Due were integral to the success of this project, which featured Studio Due’s Citybeam LED SL84 RGBW (High Power) to deliver a powerful beam of light and long-distance outdoor colour change with single LEDs. The lighting and controls were supplied and installed by Experience Lighting and Lighting Assist. The electrical contractor was G-Tech.
The new dynamic lighting scheme and Pharos Designer control solutions have enabled the cathedral to communicate messages easily via phone, marking specific dates and occasions to support its key mission. Recently, the towers were lit in purple to represent Lent, and in blue and yellow to show solidarity with the Ukraine.
The transformational lighting scheme has also allowed the cathedral to significantly reduce energy costs, therefore helping to reach the goal of carbon net zero by 2030.
