The Electric Street Lighting Apparatus Company (ESLA) was created around 1910 by Haydn Harrison, a personal friend and former school mate of Herbert Biggleston. The company, based in Canterbury, specialised in creating reflectors for electric lamps. For several decades, up unil the 1950s, ESLA and the the Biggleston Company operated in close cooperation, sharing work sites, business addresses and phone numbers (Canterbury 17!).
Several examples of the ESLA output survive in Canterbury streets. Their reflectors are dinstictive – large numbers of small mirrors set in an elaborately curved back plate. Image 1 shows a lantern (much restored) hanging in the centre of Mercery Lane – the only one of its type in the city. Images 3 to 4 show good examples of a particularly successful design, the ‘ESLA 2-way Bi-Multi lantern’ – all these (and others) survive in the cathedral precincts.
