GC Illumination Tekna

As a kid, every couple of months me and my mother would have a shopping trip round the Merry Hill centre in Dudley. Mounted in all the car parks at the time (and still is the case in some car parks) were these properly weird unusual looking lanterns I could only describe as a Kidney Bean due to their shape. Since I began collecting, I then spent all that time looking for one, and got nowhere.

A short while back, a job came in at work to replace 6 lanterns in a small cul-de-sac in the town of Devizes, Wiltshire. After a debate about what lanterns would look best, we proposed Phosco P107 lanterns, which were accepted (thankfully?) Anyway, the day came when I would make the 97 mile trip from my house each way to replace these six lanterns, and what greeted me on arrival were these lanterns mounted at 5 metres, running 150w SON. Needless to say, it would have been horribly overlit, and they absolutely stuck out like sore thumbs against the architecture of the buildings, so replacing these to LED would admittedly have definitely been a very sensible thing to do. In the end, I came away with all six of these lanterns, leaving behind a far better looking installation.

Getting home, I immediately took a closer look at one of these lanterns, and was finally able to identify them as a GC Illumination Tekna, sold under licence by Fitzgerald as a BSL lantern. I intend to have this example running Metal halide, as the ones did from my childhood. Overall its in excellent condition, and once I polish the canopy and paintwork with Brasso, and give it a deep clean internally, should hopefully make it look box fresh once more.