glass lamps were distributed throughout the City, ranging from a high of 744 in
Farringdon Ward Without to 33 in Bassishaw. Though still concentrated on
thoroughfares, they were now also to be found in courts and alleys. This was an
extraordinary advance on the system set up under the first contract. There may
still have been but a dim light produced in any one place in the City even after
1736. But it was produced until sunrise through every night of the year for the
first time, and in places where there had never been light before. E. S. De Beer’s
judgement that the City had become the best lit urban area in Europe seems
entirely reasonable given the extent of the changes.^175
The change on the streets also registered in trials at the Old Bailey. It was not
uncommon for victims and their witnesses in trials involving street crime in the
second quarter of the century to claim to be able to identify the accused because
of the light provided by street lights. ‘How do you know the Prisoner to be the
Woman’ who robbed you, one man was asked: ‘The Lamps gave a good Light’,
was his reply. Another witness in the same situation in 1737 was asked by the
judge after making an identification: ‘Was it dark at that Time?’ ‘Yes’, he
replied, ‘but there were Lamps all around us’.^176 The point is not so much per-
haps that this reveals how much the lighting of the streets had improved, but that
such identifications were plausible and were accepted by the juries, who experi-
enced the effects of the lights themselves every evening and were not likely to
have been taken in by claims of this kind if there had not been a significant im-
provement in the quality of light on the streets. And claims for the value of the
lights were made in other contexts. In supporting proposals for a number of im-
provements in Westminster in 1754 , including better lighting of the streets, John
Spranger could claim, for example, that the City’s lighting arrangements were
much superior to those of any other part of the metropolis and that they had had
a decisive effect on the level of crime and street violence over the previous two
decades. Indeed, he argued, robbery was now rare in the City of London—
proof that well-lit streets would reduce crime. ‘The wise Governors of that City’,
he said,
Policing the Night Streets 223(^175) De Beer, ‘Early History’, 323. The owners of some 14 , 000 houses, warehouses, and buildings were
liable for the lights rates ( Jor 58 , fo. 16 ). The large number of appeals against assessments, especially from
those asked to pay for the first time, and indeed of refusals to pay, gives some sense of how massive the
change had been. For the large number of such appeals and judgments on them made by the Court of
Aldermen, see Rep 141 , fos. 23 – 5, 42–4, 55, 63–4, 85, 89, 104–5, 110, 129(all in 1737 ), and for the arrears
that accumulated in the accounts over several years as a result of non-payment, see Jor 58 , fos. 83, 164,
199, 204, 206; CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box C, no. 13 ; and Rep 142 , p. 28. The sense of inequity became
strong enough that the committee of Common Council set up to oversee the lighting system was asked
in 1744 to seek an amending act from parliament to place more of the burden of the rates on the wealth-
ier bands of the population and to relieve those in the middle ( Jor 58 , fos. 283, 300). The result was a new
statute: 17 Geo II, c. ( 1744 ). The committee that sought the new act and implemented its conclusion in-
cluded men who had by then been interested in the City’s street lighting for more than a decade, includ-
ing deputy aldermen Child, Farrington, and Smart (CLRO, Misc. MSS 291.3: committee to petition
parliament for an act to amend the Lighting Act).
(^176) OBSP, December 1736 , p. 19 (No. 37 , Bailey); OBSP, April 1737 , p. 107 (No. 52 , Moreton).