“It’s like having a curfew,” says Rose Lelliott, 23. Outside her flat, on a quiet road in Exeter – the sort of place you’d imagine your mother would encourage you to live, were you a young woman moving away from home for the first time – the street lights that once guided her way to the local train station are all either broken, working at half-power or permanently snuffed out.
Lelliott commutes to London once a week, where she works as a researcher at the House of Commons. To make the train for her 9am start, she has to be out the door by 5.15am, but the streetlamps along her road are turned off between 12.30pm and 5.30am. After 9.30pm, they’re dimmed to just 40% of their usual power.
Lelliott used to make the 20-minute journey on foot, “but I wouldn’t chance it now”, she says. So she spends £9 each way on taxi fares, on top of the cost of her return ticket. “I’m having to pay because I don’t feel safe,” she says, “but I’ve also heard from a woman who’s given up her job completely because she was doing shift work. She had to choose between financial independence and her own safety.”
This is a student city, but for many women here, a night on the town is now out of the question....<<<Read More>>>...
