(among numberless other Advantages) reap this Fruit of having their Streets equally,
and regularly, lighted in Winter and Summer, from Sun-set to Sun-rise, that they are
very seldom infested with Robbers; whilst we ofWestminster, and the adjacent Parishes
within the County of Middlesex, are exposed. every Night we pass through our Streets,
to frequent Insults, Assaults, and Robberies.^177
The act of 1736 made street lighting a public service supported by tax money
but carried out by private companies—a further example of the marriage of pri-
vate energy and public authority that is such a common theme in other aspects
of policing and prosecution in this period. The fact that the service was operated
by private contractors does not diminish the point that the lighting of the streets
had been taken over as a responsibility of the governing authorities of the City,
and that it represented an extension of the reach of the state—at least, of the
state in its local guise. But the consequence of the Lighting Act was not merely
that elected officials became responsible for the administration of a local service
in ways laid down in statute. It also very considerably expanded the areas of the
City in which there could be said to be a public interest in the provision of street
lighting and significantly extended those parts of the City for which the central
administration bore some responsibility and into which public authority might
penetrate.
Street lighting was only one of a number of improvements in the urban envir-
onment in this period; one of a number of services supported by public money.
Schemes for the improvement of street cleaning and of paving, the marking-off
of pedestrian areas from the roadway on major streets, better provision of drink-
ing water—these and other improvements were underway in London and else-
where from the seventeenth century, all contributing to what has been called the
‘urban renaissance’ of the eighteenth century.^178 But street lighting was not just
a matter of general improvement in the urban environment. In the City in the
1720 s and 1730 s it was also, and perhaps mainly, thought of as a policing device
in a more specific and more modern way—as a way of bringing the streets
under surveillance and control. Effective lighting would help pedestrians to be
on their guard and the night watch and the constables to prevent crime and to
be able to distinguish between those who had legitimate reasons to move around
the City in the dead of night and those who did not; to distinguish the re-
spectable from the criminal and immoral. The problem of violent street crime
had been at the heart of the argument supporting the petitions to parliament for
224 Policing the Night Streets
(^177) John Spranger, A Proposal or Plan for an Act of Parliament for the better Paving, Cleaning, and Lighting the
Streets... of the City and Liberty of Westminster.. .( 1754 ), preface. The contrast between the lighting of the
City and Westminster was also pointed out in the London Magazinein 1743 —‘the Ungentility of this Dark-
ness at the Court End of Town, when the City of London is all illuminated’. While this writer mainly
wanted to make the feeble joke that young men were at a disadvantage in picking up a prostitute in the
Strand ‘without being able to distinguish her Face’, the superiority of the City’s lighting was clearly a
plausible argument (December, 1743, 608—a reference I owe to Randy McGowen).
(^178) Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660 – 1760
(Oxford, 1989 ), ch. 3. See also P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700 – 1800 (Oxford, 1982 ), ch. 10.