The results of these initiatives, subsequently carried out under the direction
of the City’s surveyor, George Dance, were reported to the main City Lands
Committee inJune 1735 along with a calculation of the number oflamps required
to light the City under the suggested rules.^167 Hardly surprisingly, it was this
subcommittee that put questions to the City’s legal advisers about the Corpor-
ation’s powers to raise taxes by means of a by-law, a request that led directly to
the decision to petition parliament for the statutory authority to raise a rate.
In the spring of 1735 the City Lands Committee advertised for contractors to
light the streets, though, in the event, the negotiations on behalf of the City were
turned over to a new committee of the Common Council set up to deal exclu-
sively with this issue. The outcome was a plan oflighting that incorporated new
and bold ideas. In October 1735 the Common Council endorsed a considerable
extension of street lighting by passing a motion that ‘the better to prevent Rob-
beries and other Inconveniencies’, the street lamps ought to be lit from sunset to
sunrise every night of the year. It also accepted the financial consequences of
such an extension. Since this lighting plan would cost much more than could be
extracted from those with a customary obligation to contribute directly to the
street lights, a committee of Common Council was named on 22 October 1735
to draw up a petition to parliament ‘to obtain an Act to Enable this City to
defray the Expense of such Lights’.^168
In the course of a few months, a committee of the Common Council thus
transformed the basis of the lighting arrangements in the City. What began as a
discussion of improvements—better lamps, slightly longer hours of lighting
each night, the addition of a month or two to the accustomed six of lighting on
‘dark nights’—ended by reconceiving the City’s lighting needs and imagining a
new system on a new basis. In addition, within a month of its formation this
same committee was also instructed to petition parliament for legislation to au-
thorize the collection of a rate for the obviously related matter of the night
watch.
The lighting legislation was enacted in 1736. The bill was prepared by the
committee of Common Council struck in October 1735 who had reported a
range of critical decisions to the Common Council over the intervening months.
They set up trials of various kinds of oils, coming down in the end in favour of
seal oil, which they claimed was not only cheaper than rape oil, but gave a bet-
ter light and was not as likely to be affected by cold weather. They decided that
the lamps on the main street should be twenty-five yards apart, rather than
thirty, as had been suggested the previous year. They worked out a rating
scheme based on the assessed values of houses, regardless of whether they were
Policing the Night Streets 221(^167) CLRO, Misc. MSS 141.9.
(^168) Jor 57 , fos. 348 – 55. Having lamps lit every night of the year—summer as well as winter—was not
an entirely new idea. It had been proposed in The Weekly Journal; Or, Saturday’s Postin 1722 ( 28 July) as a
way of combatting street robberies on nights that are ‘sometimes as dark as in the midst of Winter’. The
author did not, however, propose a way of paying for this extra service.