When I was a child walking home from school between villages it was sometimes a bit scary.

It was so dark, sometimes the shapes of the bushes loomed out of the hedges like people. Even when I reached our village, there were few street lights. On a clear night if you looked up you could see the stars.

When we travelled to my grandparents’ house in Middlesbrough it was a different matter. As we dipped down towards the town the sky took on an orange glow, and if you tried to see stars you couldn’t.

My parents still live in that village and, although there are more lights around new estates, a roundabout and pubs, you can still see the stars.

Many places are not so lucky. More than 80 per cent of the world’s population and 99 per cent of Europeans live under light-polluted skies, scientists at a German research centre have discovered.

A separate study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, reveals that in the UK, only a tenth of people enjoy a really dark sky. Many children will grow up never seeing the Milky Way, whereas in the 1950s most of the UK’s population would have been able to see it.

York Press:

Starry, starry night: sadly night skies like this are becoming a thing of the past

Despite being on the edge of a city, we have few street lights in our road and can still see the stars from our house, but you don’t really appreciate what a clear sky looks like until you see one.

On a visit to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales we stood under skies so clear you could see billions of stars, including little clusters, far, far away. The sky seemed full-to-bursting, and they were so sharp and bright. It was so different to the ‘clear’ skies above our house, or my parents’.

Light pollution can disrupt the body clocks of animals and cause distress to people too, disrupting sleep.

You only have to look around to see why we can’t see the sky. You can forgive heavy industry, but we don’t need so many lights in office blocks and residential areas. When I visit my sister in Central London I am always appalled by the number of high-rise office blocks that leave all their lights on overnight.

Out in the country there are light-polluting golf driving ranges, floodlit football pitches, pub beer gardens and no end of homes with enough garden lights to illuminate a football stadium. Shops are full of them, giant lights to shine on your home, to spotlights that line the drive.

There’s a house in a street near us that has what looks like an aircraft landing strip in front of it. Another, we nicknamed Guantanamo, with what look like search lights on every corner.

In the UK there’s a national Campaign for Dark Skies - sadly, they have their work cut out.