Clear Message On Climate Emergency Lights Up City Centre

A POWERFUL and illuminating message about the climate emergency, which aims to echo Plymouth’s kindness and togetherness, is lighting up one of the city centre’s landmark buildings.

- CARL EVE

The message uses the same kind of lights used on the globally renowned No New Worlds light installation and is being beamed from the face of the Civic Centre.

The efficient, low-power LED bulbs - which use less than 1kw of power when running, which is less than a toaster - will cover five storeys of the Grade II listed building, and spell out a poem, edited from a longer text written by Booker Prizewinning author Sir Ben Okri, in response to the climate emergency.

These emotive sentences come from the central refrain: Love is the highest economy of life and together call for collective change towards a more simple way of living within the finite resources of our beautiful planet. The poem will scroll across the building day and night, viewable from different parts of the city.

Okri’s text was chosen with Plymouth’s social identity in mind - the city’s spirit of togetherness that is rooted in kindness and kinship, as has frequently been displayed such as the way it came together after the horrors of the Second World War and the Blitz, right up to the latest efforts to tackle violence against women and girls in the wake of the terrible murder of teenager BobbiAnne McLeod.