Nightlife

Important Contrasts

Cities were dependent on the natural rhythms of daylight and moonlight until the end of the nineteenth century. Medieval European cities operated a curfew, and walkers carried torches after dark to identify themselves as much as to light their way. Although the modern city is associated with light, with street lighting introduced to European cities in the sixteenth century, it was not until the seventeenth century that what Schivelbusch calls the lighting of order became well established in some large European cities. The establishment of a regular grid of street lanterns that lit streets (rather than individuals or buildings) was part of the policing of the absolutist state, and London retained the older system into the eighteenth century (much as it relied on night watchmen until the nineteenth century).

Street lighting is a key aspect of modernization, along with the provision of water and other key services. Although technological developments play a significant role in the history of nightlife, particularly the advent of gas and then electric lighting in the nineteenth century, these did not necessarily make cities better lit. The reflector lamps introduced to Paris in the 1760s were much brighter than the old lanterns, but there were fewer of them, placed further apart, so the streets became darker. Gaslights might be bright and modern, but their waning, flickering light also painted shadows, as Lynda Nead points out; later, electric arc lights made adjoining streets lit by gas seem gloomy.

These geographies of illumination marked and reproduced social divisions after dark, as they still do today. International differences can be seen in images of the world at night, which show concentrations of well-lit urban centers in places like North America, Europe, the North African coast, and India, compared to gaps in much of sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that it is estimated that there will be about 300 million city dwellers there by 2010. Although the history of nightlife has often been told through the history of illumination, the link between the two is complicated.

The relationship between lighting and festivity was well established in the early modern city, and the illumination of the town's windows was a common way of celebrating national success or political upheaval. Gas and electricity also encouraged the expansion of commercial lighting: illuminated shop fronts and interiors, the gaslights of places of entertainment like London's gin palaces in the 1830s, and later the electric cinema marquees and signs of sites like Times Square (from 1904) and Piccadilly Circus (1910). These “bright lights” became synonymous with city life.

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