“It’s like having a curfew,” says Rose Lelliott, 23. Outside her flat, on a quiet road in Exeter – the sort of place you’d imagine your mother would encourage you to live, were you a young woman moving away from home for the first time – the street lights that once guided her way to the local train station are all either broken, working at half-power, or permanently snuffed out.
Lelliott commutes to London once a week, where she works as a researcher at the House of Commons. To make the train for her 9am start, she has to be out the door by 5.15am, but the streetlamps along her road are turned off between 12.30pm and 5.30am. After 9.30pm, they’re dimmed to just 40 per cent of their usual power.
