When I was growing up in deepest, darkest Essex in the late 50's/early 60's, we had 500W incandescents in our street. Don't really recall much about them other than that as they were swapped for MV's when I was about 5 or 6. They sparked my interest in lighting, though 

Smaller lanterns on side roads used 150w GLS lamps as well

The City of Bern used special incandescent bulbs with the mark “S” till around the year 2004. Starting from 75W for post top lanterns up to 1000W for the spanwire lanterns in the city centre.
Nowadays the same fixtures are using CDM - T 35 to 150W. I did help to convert these old fixtures to modern metalhalide lamp technique.

If it's a series fixture be aware that if you just plug it in you'll get a dead short and blow the circuit breaker if the lamp is missing or burned out. I'm not concerned with the Jones socket assembly being pulled out while hot, but I was concerned about the lamp burning out. I removed the shunt from between the prongs of the Jones socket and used a piece of an old credit card wrapped in electrical tape as an insulator.

Interesting to hear about the use of series lamps for street lighting, we never had that here, at least not as far as I'm aware. What were the reasons for it..? It seems to me that if one lamp failed, it could take out a whole chunk of the street 

What were the reasons for it..?

Get higher operating voltages, so prevent the need for high currents in the circuit, but still avoid the need for the lamp itself to see the high voltage (it means lower efficacy/shorter life/higher cost with incandescents).
Plus because the majority losses in electrical power distribution are in the wire resistance, it means all lamps get in an easy way exactly the same power, so it was possible to operate all at maximum efficacy while having their wear still under control.

It seems to me that if one lamp failed, it could take out a whole chunk of the street 

No, there were bypass devices:
The lamp socket was in a type of connector, which shorts out when the lamp socket was pulled out from the fixture.
The socket side of that connector was made so the input conductors were separated by a thin paper disc.
Normally the lamp filament kept the voltage in check, so the disc remains an isolation.
But when the filament burns out, full circuit OCV becomes present across the thin disc. Becase that was usually few kV, the disc was not able to handle that voltage and it burned through, shorting the contacts and by that automatically bypassing the failed lamp.
With lamp replacement, the lamp socket, together with the burned disc was pulled from the fixture, at least to disconnect it from the high voltage (so to allow safe lamp replacement). The contacts in the fixture directly closed,keeping the circuit complete.
Then the service man replaced both the lamp, as well as the disc (and inspected the socket) and then stick the lamp socket back into the fixture.
Some makers offered lamp types with the bypass device built into the lamp assemblies (so the paper disc remained unburnt), but I don't know if that ever became wide spread (the lamps were more expensive, while the paper disc were really a cut piece of hard paper, so really dirt cheap; and the lamp internal bypass may have been not 100% efficient in preventing the paper disc from degrading/burning, so its inspection, costing the same effort so labor money, remained necessary anyway).

Since then similar bypass device (although designed for lower voltages and currents) became common in the Christmas tree lamp sets till they become replaced by LEDs. There it is in the form of an oxidized wire wrapped around the lead in wires within the lamps. The high voltage then breaks down the oxide layer, causing the wires to short through there.

Ah, thanks for that, now you've explained it, it makes sense. I'm not aware of the concept ever being used here, though.

I use to show vintage, Petter, stationary engines from 1996 until 2013, anywho, to cut a long story short, I have many books on the history of Petter engines, and one interesting thing I remember reading in one of these books, (don`t remember which at the minute), is that when street lighting first started to go from gas to electric, some small towns in the UK use to have `sub stations` for the street lighting.

Now, in these sub stations there were not transformers as you would find today, (as this pre-dated the grid system and power stations), but a large Petter oil engine, coupled to a kick (...) generator!, and all of the towns public lighting was fed from the engine house.

Not quite unlike a photo cell, the `street lighting crew`, of 4, would fire the engine up at dusk, and two men would look after the engine all night, whilst the other two walked the streets, with a small ladder and a `cart` of incandescent lamps, checking for outed lamps, and repairing them!  

What a fantastic job to of had back in the 1800s!

Series street lighting was never used in the U.K. however it was used by southern railway in specially made lanterns that contained 3 gls lampsin series.

Not quite unlike a photo cell, the `street lighting crew`, of 4, would fire the engine up at dusk, and two men would look after the engine all night, whilst the other two walked the streets, with a small ladder and a `cart` of incandescent lamps, checking for outed lamps, and repairing them!  

What a fantastic job to of had back in the 1800s!

Absolutely, I would have loved to do that 

Absolutely, I would have loved to do that 

Beside of working and planing on the powergrid in general I’m the lighting guy who’s responsible for the entire streetlighting in our city and some smaller villages around. 

Beside of working and planing on the powergrid in general I’m the lighting guy who’s responsible for the entire streetlighting in our city and some smaller villages around. 

In that case, stop fitting [censored] LED's 

And sadly another good non led topic gets turned towards led frustration.

And sadly another good non led topic gets turned towards led frustration.

LED it be! 

I use to show vintage, Petter, stationary engines from 1996 until 2013, anywho, to cut a long story short, I have many books on the history of Petter engines, and one interesting thing I remember reading in one of these books, (don`t remember which at the minute), is that when street lighting first started to go from gas to electric, some small towns in the UK use to have `sub stations` for the street lighting.

Now, in these sub stations there were not transformers as you would find today, (as this pre-dated the grid system and power stations), but a large Petter oil engine, coupled to a kick (...) generator!, and all of the towns public lighting was fed from the engine house.

Not quite unlike a photo cell, the `street lighting crew`, of 4, would fire the engine up at dusk, and two men would look after the engine all night, whilst the other two walked the streets, with a small ladder and a `cart` of incandescent lamps, checking for outed lamps, and repairing them!  

What a fantastic job to of had back in the 1800s!

I had no idea that electric street lights had been around that long... 

When I say 1800s, I mean late 1800s early 1900s