The Lord?s Cricket Ground, in St John?s Wood, north London, is the ?Mecca of Cricket???. First established by Thomas Lord in 1787, it has hosted numerous cricket matches enjoyed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) Museum here is the world?s oldest sporting museum and best known for being the home of the Ashes.

Understandably, floodlighting the Lord?s is perhaps one of the most challenging lighting jobs on which anybody would dare to work. It took a specialist firm nearly three years to design and install four cutting-edge telescopic floodlights that satisfied the lighting requirements of cricket players and television camera crews. The tasks were made even more difficult by local residents who demanded that light pollution and visual impact should be kept at the minimum. Any failure to achieve these goals would have caused serious damage to the reputation of English cricket.

Lighting jobs in the Lord?s had been an emotive subject, as poor floodlighting could lead to catches being missed, matches being lost and supporters being enraged for the rest of their lives. Erecting temporary scaffolding-style lights was out of question, as local residents had rejected their industrial look and noisy generators. Furthermore, establishing permanent floodlights would enable the Lord?s to bid for important and lucrative matches such as the World Twenty20 Tournament.

Most importantly, those with lighting jobs had to be careful in choosing floodlights. While low floodlights cause shadowing problems that can only be solved by adding more floodlights, which in turn can cause more lighting pollution, floodlights that are 40 metres or higher pose a visual intrusion.

In the end, retractable floodlights were used. Using cranes and hydraulic technologies, four sets of 10.8-metre-by-5.9-metre headframes were raised 48 metres above ground for installation. Each headframe is augmented by its piled concrete foundation and contains 100 floodlights to provide lighting that meets all standards necessary for HDTV broadcast. Using a CAD design system, those with lighting jobs managed to adjust the floodlights and provide sufficient illumination over the central wicket, the inner field and the boundary, without annoying local residents.