Introduction 3Notes to Map 1.- 1735-StJames, Piccadilly; StGeorge, Hanover Square
2 1736-St Martin-in-the-Fields; St Paul, Covent Garden; St Margaret and StJohn,
Westminster; St Anne, Soho - 1737-St Andrew, Holbom; Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, and Ely Rents
- 1738 - Christchurch, Spitalfields
- 1749-St Leonard, Shoreditch
- 1750 - St John, Horselydown
- 1751 - St Matthew, Bethnal Green
- 1754-St Luke, Old Street
- 1756-St George-in-the-East; St Anne, Limehouse; StJohn, Wapping; St Paul,
Shadwell; Ratcliffe; Well Oose; St Marylebone - 1763-StMary, Whitechapel; StJohn, Hackney
- 1764-St Cement Danes
- 1766 - St Andrew, Holbom and St George-the-Martyr, Middlesex; St George-
the-Martyr, Southwark; St Saviour; St Olave; StJohn, Horselydown; StThomas;
St Mary, Newington; St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey - 1771-StJohn, Oerkenwell
- 1772-StMary, Islington
- 1774-StJames, Oerkenwell; St Giles-in-the-Fields and StGeorge, Bloomsbury
- 1776-Camberwell and Peckham
- 1777-StMary, Newington; Mile End, Old Town
- 1780 - Mile End, New Town
- 1785-StMary, Bermondsey; St Catherine
- 1786 - Clink Liberty, Southwark
- 1797 - Tower Hill
- 1804 - St Nicholas, Deptford
- 1823 -Greenwich
Source: House of Commons Journals. This list includes only the initial legislation for
each parish and does not include turnpike trust acts that included provisions for a
night watch act nor acts for areas too small for this map.
evidence in criminal trial records before 1829 that suggests 'a watch system
functioning in some parts of the metropolis which possessed men behaving in
the active and obsetvant way which, according to the Whig historians, was
introduced only with the new Metropolitan Police'.^7
The danger of local studies is that they often can seem disconnected from
larger topics, one step removed from genealogy perhaps. But John Brewer,
Joanne Innes, David Eastwood, and Joan Kent clearly demonstrate that the
relationship of local and national government is key for understanding how
the eighteenth-century state functioned.^8 Parish government was a pivotal
arena not only for the implementation of national policies but for initiatives
that strengthened government as a whole. Kent writes: ~ examination of how
the state functioned at its most intimate level in certain areas of administration
and Jaw enforcement makes it difficult to accept that England in the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an unchanging 'ancien regime',