seen in the attempts by the City authorities to strengthen surveillance, particu-
larly at night, by improving the watch and by a transformation of street lighting
so extensive as to require a considerable expansion of the notion of public space
and the public interest.
Improvements in the night watch and in street lighting were made possible by
a fundamental change in the way such services were provided—a change from
the customary obligation of householders to play a role in civic life, by, for ex-
ample, taking a turn in a variety of local offices, or by hanging out a light at their
doors, or cleaning a portion of the street in front of their houses, to a new obliga-
tion, authorized by acts of parliament, to contribute taxes that would support
those services. The power acquired by the City authorities to collect a rate in
support of the watch and street lighting gave such local amenities the appear-
ance of being aspects of some general plan of civil administration, and explains,
it seems to me, why for a brief period, the elements of police came to be equated
with the broader tasks of civic government. The short-lived idea of policing as
civil administration was no doubt borrowed, as others have suggested, from the
French. But it also emerged in England in the early eighteenth century as a mat-
ter of practice, as the by-product of a change from a system under which local
services depended on the direct engagement of householders to a rates-based
provision of services. Each service affected—cleaning, lighting, watching,
sewerage—could have been supported by a separate rate, but that would have
threatened administrative anarchy. It was as much perhaps the convenience of
tax collection as the conviction that all these matters needed to be co-ordinated
that explains their concentration in the hands of one body of local officials.
In the second half of the century the responsibility for the raising of rates and
the management of the services they supported thus tended to be put into the
hands of ‘improvement commissioners’, set up by authority of parliament.^19
The City acquired such a body in 1763. But, as we will see, long before that, the
personal obligation to serve on the night watch and to provide street lighting
had been eliminated in favour of a local rate in the City. Along with some of the
larger parishes in Westminster, the City of London led the way in the acquisition
of these new policing powers and mobilized them long before they were gener-
ally made available to commissions of improvement. In the City, these powers
were administered by the political leaders of the wards—in particular, the
deputy alderman and some of the other common councillors. These so-called
‘common councils of the wards’, emerged in the seventeenth and early eight-
eenth centuries as the effective managers of ward government, largely replacing
the alderman, the nominal leader of the ward, and the wardmote, the annual
meeting of the inhabitants. This concentration of authority brought some of the
84 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^19) The work and importance of the improvement commissioners have been outlined by Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Manor and the
Borough( 1908 ), ch. 10 ; and Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes( 1922 ), ch. 4. The Webbs date the first of
these statutory bodies to 1748.