Portsmouth Harbour Renaissance was a £100 million plan to revitalise the former navy land around its harbour, regenerate the area and give the water’s edge back to the public. Some £3 million was devoted to lighting approximately 60 buildings, making the Portsmouth Harbour scheme the largest exterior lighting project in the UK at the time. This was the second strategy that Sutton Vane Associates wrote for the Portsmouth area. The first was for the Historic Dockyard.

The two inter-linked strategies led to the co-ordinated lighting design of buildings, structures and vessels, and included part of Gosport which lies across the busy harbour. ‘Some of the very important buildings that you saw around the harbour were nowhere near it,’ explains principal Mark Sutton Vane, ’the classic being the Guild Hall, a wonderful late Victorian building with a tall tower.’

Despite its distance from the water, the council agreed that the whole of the Guild Hall’s exterior should be lit. The masterplan received a Lighting Design Award.  Timespace, an area in Gosport which has a ‘sundial’ with LEDS activated by radio time signal, also won a Landscape Award.