At James Hooker's website, I've been discovered recently, that despite the LPS lamp is of an european origin (Philips, Holland), it gained much more popularity in the UK than any country in Europe and became a distinct british icon, light source (Indeed the british SOX lanterns had so distinct design, that it was very easy to distingush between a british lantern and the european lanterns of their era).
How this was happened? How the LPS reached such from Europe to the UK?

This is an interesting question. I looked at who Arthur H Compton was, the original developer of the LPS lamp and the first to obtain a patent for a borate glass in 1919, but was an American. It's possible that the UK did not have much electricity by 1932 when Philips first introduced the practical sodium lamp. The first practical mercury lamp came just about the same time in 1932 in the UK by Osram GEC, so who knows why the sodium lamp became more popular.

If I remember well, even when the SOX was not invented there, the technology improvements necessary to make it really wide scale usable happened there (Osram GEC). The question is, whether that was really a cause or just a consequence of the SOX popularity over there (a kind of chicken-egg problem)...

Definitely in the era of road lanterns without any elaborate optics (that came only in the last few decades, as it works only with pointy sources such as HPS or MH; and to make it reasonably cheap and fast into some new shape, it needs computer simulation; so a thing of only last few decades as well), the large source surface area was not that much problem, so the SOX efficacy was far above the rest of the light sources, so when someone didn't care about the color, it may have been the cheapest light source at that time.

And with the lighting of the highways: The question is, if that would have ever happened, when there were no such high efficacy source available. So I guess again another "chicken-egg"...

According to Zelandeth's website , SOX lamps were popular in the UK, also at homes, what wasn't correct to Europe.
I think that James Hooker knows the answer, why LPS lamps were much popular in the UK than anywhere in the world, despite it isn't a british invention.

Interesting question.  I think the reason has much to do with the personal influence of people working at the R&D laboratories of the factories in each country.

Remember that at the time of Philips' invention, all patents and know-how were openly shared among the main competitors.  They were afraid that they might one day be put out of business by a brilliant invention of their competitor, so they decided to share  their inventions openly and lead to a more stable business for all.  They also recognised that lamp development is a rather difficult and scientifically advanced subject, and it was often beyond the resources of one company to fully develop a particular technology on its own.

So when Philips was developing the LPS lamp, the ideas were openly shared with the competition.  Around that time, Osram of Germany was a weak company having been crippled by loss of its markets snd territories in the last war, and the Americans were busy on their developments in fluorescent and incandescent.  The British meanwhile had recently set up three large research labs at BTH, GEC and Philips and apparently had the capacity to research many new discharge technologies.  Around the same time they all jumped on the Eindhoven innovations and sought to further develop the technology.

Back then I guess it was no different than today - that when you develop a new lamp, there is always strong pressure from the engineers to set up field trials close to their labs, and if successful they naturally want so see their creations go into wider use around them.  As Medved says, a few of the main improvements in LPS lighting came from the British labs, so its perhaps natural that LPS lighting grew to dominate the British market.

NB since I left the UK some years ago with the decline of its industrial activity, I have to say that LPS lighting is equally popular in Holland and Belgium.  Perhaps even more so today.  Recently a long motorway here was re-lit, the whole stretch with quad 66W SOX-E lamps on each column.  Whereas SOX is now shrinking quickly in UK, new installations are surprisingly still appearing in Belgium.

Interesting. I didn't know that the manufacturing was open between manufacturers, and only the british lighting companies was able to contribute to the LPS lighting developments, while american lighting companies were busy on incandescent and fluorescent lighting and Osram was a small company with a weak market, and so the LPS popularity there.

Seen ads in 1930's Popular Mechanics magazines for GE LPS streetlights.