An Expanding Watch, 1748-76 33those streets led to the spread and adaptation of the Westminster model of
night watch.The East End differed from the West End in significant ways but local
authorities there sought similar legislation and established similar forces of
constables, beadles, and watchmen. As London grew in the seventeenth
century, the wealthy moved west, leaving an inner circle of parishes around
the City (like Clerkenwell and Whitechapel) and the riverside parishes east
of the Thwer of London to the poorer classes and commercial develop-
ment.29 M. Dorothy George has noted:
while West London was developed largely by the laying out of streets and
squares on long leases, regulated by private and local Acts, East London
grew obscurely, its development apparently influenced by the customs
(confirmed by statute) of the great liberty of the manors of Stepney and
Hackney ....^30
Those customs forbade the long leases that allowed for the planned devel-
opment of the West End. Instead, we see a more haphazard sprawl - an
expanding population pushed residential and commercial development in
the East End out along the major roads leading to and from the City,
Whitechapel Road and the Commercial Road, for instance. By the early
nineteenth century, the areas between these major arteries were largely built
over. Spitalfields and Bethnal Green were 'developed or merely "filled out"
in a "straggling, confus'd manner", without plan or purpose'.^31
The dockside areas of the East End became a thriving centre for com-
merce and industry. Dockworkers, sailors, watermen, coopers and all whose
livelihood was connected with the Thames and the Port of London congre-
gated in the riverside parishes like Stepney and Wapping.^32 The labouring
poor were joined by more middling sorts - shipbuilders and brokers, mer-
chants, wharfingers, warehousemen, importers, victuallers and brewery own-
ers. These people were drawn, by virtue of their occupations, to Shoreditch
and Hackney.^3 There was thus a greater degree of social homogeneity in the
east as compared to the West End.
In his study of petty crime, Robert Shoemaker suggests the pattern of
prosecutions indicate fewer social tensions in the East End. Most prosecu-
tions in the East End were for minor breaches of the peace (cursing, minor
assault) and few were for vice crimes (gambling, keeping disorderly house).
There were also fewer active justices than in Westminster and those that
there were preferred mediation to prosecution.^34 In the City of London,
Peter Earle has found that middling people tended to be stable residents,
once they married and acquired a house. Forty to fifty per cent of the