fire and the new building codes. By the last third of the seventeenth century and
the early decades of the eighteenth commercial and cultural changes were also
revealing the inadequacies of the lighting on streets that continued to be busy
after 9 p.m., given the increasing numbers of people wanting to move around
the City even when darkness fell.
Other considerations may be added to general shifts in social life that created
new expectations with respect to urban amenities in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and encouraged new approaches to street lighting in par-
ticular. One was fear about the threat of violence on the streets, expressed in
royal proclamations, in mayoral precepts and other public documents, in pri-
vate correspondence, and by such bodies as the City’s grand jurors, many of
whom had long experience of the character and levels of offences prosecuted at
the Old Bailey, and who had some standard of comparison. Anxiety about the
streets of the City after dark, justified or not, was certainly shared widely enough
to be plausibly brought into play as support for schemes to improve street light-
ing. The obligation of householders on the main thoroughfares of the City to
hang candles outside their doors on ‘dark nights’ was confirmed by the Com-
mon Council in 1695 as a means of providing for ‘the conveniency of Passen-
gers’, but also to secure ‘Houses against Robbers and Thieves, [and] for the
prevention of murder’.^132
Despite the opposition of those with a vested interest in maintaining the
customary system of lighting with candles in tin-lanterns with horn sides,^133 two
other circumstances (apart from the conviction that street crime was getting
worse) persuaded the City authorities there was a need for better lighting and
help to explain why it was the City of London that took the lead in this area of
urban improvement. One was specific to the City; the other not. The more gen-
eral was the inventive and entrepreneurial energy being brought to bear on this,
as on so many other aspects of social and economic life in this period. Several
men in the 1670 s and 1680 s saw the possibility of providing a service and filling
a need (and earning a profit) by developing oil lamps for city streets to replace
candles and lanterns. Most were being designed to burn oil from rape seed and
to have a glass rather than a horn casing.^134 Several of these inventions attracted
investors interested in participating in joint-stock ventures to provide a lighting
service in the City, and by the 1680 s groups of such ‘projectors’ were competing
for contracts to place their lamps in public places and to encourage individual
householders to pay them to replace candles with oil lamps that the company
210 Policing the Night Streets
(^132) Jor 52 , fo. 61.
(^133) For the complaints of the company of tallow chandlers that lamp lights varied from the ancient
custom and would be prejudicial to their trade, and similar arguments by the horners, the butchers’ com-
pany, and the tin plate workers, see Rep 92 , pp. 78 – 9, 87– 8 ; Jor 51 , fo. 220 ; and Company of Tallow-
Chandlers, City of London. Reasons humbly offered to the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor, aldermen and commons, of the
City of London... against setting up and establishing the lamp-lights of any sort in this City.. .(n.d.).
(^134) Falkus, ‘Lighting’, 254.