Standing tall over the city, Lincoln Cathedral is a magnificent and iconic international landmark, and one of Britain's most spectacular pieces of architecture. Once admired as the tallest building in the world, the spire at Lincoln Cathedral was an impressive feat of engineering, reaching a remarkable 525 feet before the central spire collapsed in 1548, nearly 250 years after its completion, and was never replaced.
The cathedral has provided a beacon of light for residents of the city and visitors to enjoy, whilst being viewed from vantage points all over the county and beyond.
As part of Lincoln Cathedral Connected - a multi-million-pound transformational project funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund - significant work has been undertaken to radically improve the cathedral's setting and visitor experience, offering engaging and dynamic spaces for many more visitors to enjoy.
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. The previous exterior lighting was installed in 1970 and became obsolete; it accumulated very high running costs and posed other challenges in terms of care and maintenance. The uplighting for the cathedral's three towers needed replacing, and an essential component of the design brief was to change the orange-tinted floodlights for softer, whiter lights, to showcase the cathedral's intricate stonework and Gothic features.
In accordance with the carefully considered lighting brief, Pharos Architectural Controls was selected by Light Perceptions to bring the project to life, using Pharos Cloud to control the external lighting scheme remotely. Pharos Cloud offers simple and secure lighting installation control and management remotely from any PC, tablet or mobile, any time and from anywhere in the world. Featuring a highly adaptable online scheduler, Pharos Cloud 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 important, local, national and international events.