42 Before the Bobbieswas of no avail, however and the bill passed.^79 It seems probable that the more
wealthy residents of St John, Clerkenwell, first, were successful in jettisoning
the poorer half of the parish from their poor rates and, second, were more
interested in more formal arrangements for law enforcement and less inter-
ested in relying on older forms of personal service and voluntary measures.^80
The establishment of the night watch in this instance was also part of a power
struggle within the two parishes, not unlike the power struggles in Westmin-
ster. Here too, Parliament provided the public arena in which local factions
could fight out their differences. Again Parliament was not an unbiased
referee and favoured the larger, wealthier property-owners to the more
humble. At least those in StJames got a chance to protest.
The fears expressed by the propertied residents of Kingston and Clerken-
well were increasingly common. It came to be believed that when effective
policing was established in one parish, the criminals and malefactors who
operated there would move into adjoining parishes. A letter to The Gazetteer
and New Daily Advertiser in 1766 complained:
I believe everyone is struck with the unusual assembly of disorderly
persons in St. James' Park: the gamblers, idle servants out of place, and
all other loose miscreants, that the care of the magistrates hath driven
from Moorfields, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and other parts of the town, seem
to have made that their head-quarters of late ... .'^81Jenifer Hart calls this 'the migration theory' and while she maintains in the
nineteenth century the migration theory is not supported by crime statistics,
she states: 'contemporaries thought that there was a vast migration of
criminals from London, and that this belief was one reason at any rate, if
not the only reason, for improving the police of the boroughs.'^82
The same was true of parochial police reform in the eighteenth century.
Crime was perceived to be moving from the more crowded central areas in
an ever widening circle to the suburbs. Because contemporaries came to
believe the migration theory, improved policing spread from the poorer,
more densely populated areas bordering on the river and the City to the
more outlying areas that only became part of greater London in the eight-
eenth century. We see this process in Surrey when Camberwell and Peckham
sought a lighting and watching act in 1776, because they were becoming
'large and populous, and from their Vicinity to the Metropolis, the Inhabit-
ants thereof, and also. all Persons passing to and from the same in the Night-
Time are much exposed to Robberies and other Outrages'.^83 Because of
their proximity to more developed parishes, the residents of these more
outlying regions began to feel the need for more concerted efforts at crime
prevention. Police reform thus followed the roads.
In Surrey and Kent, many new roads opened in conjunction with the
construction of new bridges across the Thames such as Westminster and