in the City and across the metropolis as a whole, the watch may well have been
a more effective and reliable force in the settled wards of the inner City than in
the large wards on its outskirts. It is worth remembering that the Shepheard tav-
ern was in Cheapside. Nicholas Wade and his men may not have been as will-
ing to confront the company in a tavern in Blackfriars, or St Andrew, Holborn,
or in any of the other poor and crowded areas of the City. Inevitably, the view of
policing that can be derived from contemporary commentators or from grand
juries or from complaints to the aldermen were likely to reflect the problems of
policing in the largest and most difficult wards.
How effectively the night watch managed its policing duties or how its effect-
iveness may have changed in the century following the Restoration are matters
about which there is no reliable evidence. It no doubt left a good deal to be de-
sired as a policing body in 1750. But the watch had also changed over the previ-
ous ninety years—at the least in its structure (in the development of
watchhouses and regular beats), in its financial underpinnings, possibly in the
character and quality of its personnel. All things considered, it had come to re-
semble the force that replaced it in 1839 (when the City formed its own version
of the Metropolitan Police) more than the watch that had taken to the streets in
1660.^123
That is surmise. We can be more positive with respect to changes over the
same period in one other area connected with crime-fighting at night that we
have had occasion to mention: that is, the huge improvement that came over the
City as a result of changes in the way its streets were lit. To that closely related
subject, we will now turn.
Street lighting
Between 1689 and the middle of the eighteenth century the lighting of city
streets was transformed in London and in many provincial towns.^124 The streets
remained gloomy by modern standards, as they were bound to do until gas
and then electricity replaced candles and oil lamps. But in relative terms the
Policing the Night Streets 207(^123) For the watch and policing forces generally at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early
decades of the nineteenth, see Reynolds, Before the Bobbies; Paley, ‘ “An Imperfect, Inadequate and
Wretched System”? Policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice History, 10 ( 1989 ), 95 – 130 ; Clive Ems-
ley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2 nd edn. ( 1996 ); Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in
England and Ireland, 1780 – 1850 (Cambridge, 1988 ), 11 – 18 ; Andrew T. Harris, ‘Policing the City,
1785 – 1838 : Local Knowledge and Central Authority in the City of London’, Ph.D. thesis (Stanford Uni-
versity, 1997 ); Rumbelow, I Spy Blue, ch. 5 , and other work cited in Ch. 2 , n. 14.
(^124) For helpful introductions to this, see E. S. de Beer, ‘The Early History of London Street Lighting’,
History, 25 ( 1940 – 1 ), 311 – 24 ; and especially Malcolm Falkus, ‘Lighting in the Dark Ages of English Eco-
nomic History: Town Streets before the Industrial Revolution’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.),
Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher( 1976 ), 248 – 73. And for
the convergence of public and private interests in the improvement of London streets in this period, par-
ticularly paving and provision for pedestrians, see Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies
1680 – 1780 (New York, 1998 ), ch. 3.