Such ideas represented considerable extensions of the street lighting currently
provided. They were introduced not by chance but by the growing conviction
that better lighting was essential, a view represented by a group of common coun-
cilmen, including a number of deputy aldermen, from the largest and least well-
provided wards of the City. The men who pushed for an improved night watch,
funded in a new way, also campaigned for better street lighting, and for the same
reason: because the wards they represented suffered the most from crime and dis-
order on the streets and yet were too poor to be well served by the customary way
that the watch and lighting had been provided in the past. As we have seen, such
men were well represented on the City Lands Committee; they attended regu-
larly, and were particularly active on the subcommittee set up to work out the de-
tails of the new lighting contract—a self-selected subcommittee since it consisted
of any member of the main committee who chose to attend. Deputy aldermen
and other common councilmen attended the committee and its subcommittee
assiduously. In 1734 all twelve of the commoners on the City Lands Committee at-
tended virtually all of the meetings at which lighting issues were discussed, but
only three of the six aldermen on the committee. In the following year of the
eleven regular attenders, nine were commoners, including five deputy alder-
men.^164 Such men, who had an immediate and practical interest in the manage-
ment of the lights in their wards, also dominated the subcommittee established in
November 1734 to think through the detailed issues surrounding a new lighting
contract. It was this subcommittee that urged the adoption of glass globular
lamps in place of the convex lamps, that suggested they be lit every day between
10 August and the end of April (not just on ‘dark nights’), that they be lit from sun-
set until 1 a.m. (not 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.), and to be thirty yards apart—all of them
ideas that represented a considerable extension of the system in being. They also
pressed to have the streets measured and the houses counted, ward by ward, with
an account of their rental values—surveys that seem likely to have been designed
to reveal disparities among the wards between the space to be lit and (so long as
the financial base remained the customary obligations of the wealthier house-
holders) the resources available to support the number oflamps required.^165 Sev-
eral members of the City Lands Committee and its subcommittee on the lights
were involved in the decision to create a more extensive street lighting system, but
the names that appear regularly in the minutes are those of the deputy aldermen
and common councilmen from the largest and poorest wards, in particular
John Smart, deputy aldermen for the ward of Aldersgate Within, Henry Wiley,
deputy for Bishopsgate Without, Thomas Nash, deputy alderman for Farring-
don Without, and Robert Evans, a common councilman for Tower ward.^166
220 Policing the Night Streets
(^164) CLRO,Journal of the Committee on City Lands, vol. 26 , passim.
(^165) The results of these surveys for the wards of Walbrook, Tower, Farringdon Without, Queenhithe,
Langbourn, and Bread Street are included in a file of documents pertaining to street lighting at CLRO,
Misc. MSS 15.5.
(^166) CLRO,Journal of the Committee on City Lands, vol. 26 , fos. 204, 210– 11 ; vol. 27 , fos. 15 – 18, 42.