Wind Street, Swansea — 1,760 RGBW globes illuminating the pollarded tree canopy of a £2m regeneration scheme.
Wind Street, in the centre of Swansea, has long been a vibrant area serving the city's night-time economy — restaurants, bars and clubs that bring the street to life after dark. The council's brief, as part of a £2m regeneration, was to extend that vibrancy across the full daily cycle: turn the street into a destination for family dining, daytime coffee and informal meeting places, not only night-time venues.
The canvas was already there. The pollarded trees lining Wind Street — pruned annually for the practical needs of the urban environment — left a bare canopy of branches above the pavement for most of the year. Where most lighting designers see absence, MaxiLED Lighting saw a continuous suspension system already in place across the street. A frame of 1,760 individually addressable RGBW globes was specified to occupy it.
The technical answer was the MaxiLED Large Globe DMX RGBW. Driven by a Pharos LPX20 controller over MaxiLINK two-core cable, the globes are visible by day as saturated chromatic objects against the tree branches, and become a fully programmable colour show after dusk.
The 1,760 globes are distributed across the pollarded tree canopy along the full length of Wind Street — chromatic accent during the day, programmable colour show after dark. Each globe is individually addressable, which means the lighting designer can drive the whole street as one continuous chromatic gesture, or split it into independent zones for restaurants, bars and pedestrian crossings.
MaxiLINK two-core cable carries both 48 VDC power and DMX512 data along the same conductor — no separate signal harness running the full length of the street, which is critical when the system has to be discreet within a heritage townscape. Pharos LPX20 handles the programme: hospitality-warm tones for the early evening dining service, saturated colour sweeps for civic events, and a slow breathing programme for the deep night register.
By day, the globes read as a permanent chromatic intervention on Wind Street — saturated colour objects suspended across the tree canopy, inviting and uplifting against the architecture of the city centre. The brief was explicit: the lighting should not disappear in daylight. The Large Globe's painted shell ensures that, even unlit, each fixture is a visible object on the street.
By night, the system becomes an instrument. Pharos LPX20 drives the full DMX RGBW spectrum — warm chromatic register for restaurants in early evening service, saturated colour for civic events and seasonal programmes, slow breathing transitions for the late-night register. One hardware infrastructure, multiple operating modes calibrated to Wind Street's many lives.
"The brief was to extend Wind Street's character across the full daily cycle. The MaxiLED Globe Series let us specify a single hardware solution that performs as a chromatic accent by day and a fully programmable lighting show by night. One spec, two registers — that's what the regeneration scheme needed."
Wind Street is a turnkey reference: MaxiLED Large Globe DMX RGBW on the lighting side, Pharos LPX20 on the programming side, MaxiLINK two-core cable in between. The same architecture scales from 50-globe installations to multi-thousand-globe civic schemes. Talk to a specialist about photometric data, IES files and project-specific pricing.