There will be a standard design for street lights on Douglas promenades, after Douglas Council agreed to replace some of its older columns.

Under the Department of Infrastructure’s promenades regeneration scheme, the lights from the bottom of Summer Hill to the Sea Terminal are being replaced.

The DoI is installing columns only along the sea side of the promenade which will illuminate both sides of the road.

However, the department is not replacing the lights beyond Summer Hill to the point of Douglas’s boundary with Onchan where the older columns remain, worn by years’ worth of facing the island’s weather.

The issue led to councillors asking where Douglas promenades end and if they should be installing the lighting all the way up to the Onchan boundary and whether the council could afford to pay for the replacement columns.

Leader David Christian said the council had to replace the existing columns saying they were worn and ’tatty’, although he did criticise the DoI for not doing the lightning all the way along Douglas’s sea front, a decision he said was ’nonsense’.

Mr Christian said the promenades scheme should be ’finished in one hit’ and warned members that the council would be criticised if it decided to leave the lights and then tried to replace them next year once the first phase of the DoI’s new timetable is complete.

The chairman of the environmental services committee, Councillor Ritchie McNicholl, said the council had ’missed an opportunity’ to do the lights when the road was relaid near Strathallan but that members did not know how much the existing lights would stick out.

Mr Christian confirmed to the council that his executive committee would undertake the project to ensure it is done in time with the planned ending of the first phase of the promenades regeneration being complete in April 2021.