out lanterns, Dee’s view again was that the City did not have such power, since
the reason for the custom is the general convenience to all persons passing the
streets, the lighting of courts would only be for the convenience of the persons
who lived there. Thomson’s answer again revealed his impatience with such ar-
guments: ‘The Common Council have power to redress all disorders and mis-
chiefs by a proper and fitting remedy’, he wrote, ‘and to prevent Robberies,
Theft, Murther, and other mischiefs which may happen in the Dark they may
require Lights to be hung out in these Courts or places tho no thorough fares,
’tis also for the conveniency of passengers in those places.’^158
Thomson was clearly determined to strengthen the defences against crime.
He wrote as a prosecutor, and his contribution to this discussion underlines the
importance of street lighting to those interested in crime prevention. The bur-
den ofhis advice was that, faced with new problems, the Common Council had
the power to make what rules they liked. From one point of view, what was being
debated was the issue of what was public space, what private. Those who lived
in principal streets had a duty to light them for the common good. The sec-
ondary streets that were not thoroughfares, even more the lanes and alleys and
courtyards in which a large proportion of the population lived, were not re-
garded as ‘public’ in the same sense. And in 1716 , when the new lease was
awarded again to Alderman Gerrard and the other proprietors of the Convex
Lights, that view prevailed. The matter of the lighting around large buildings
and in the numerous dark courts and alleys of the City was again left to be ne-
gotiated by the aldermen, ward by ward and case by case. That problem
continued to rankle.
Disputes over financial matters, and the continuing issue of payments for the
lamps around public buildings for which payment had not been settled in the
contract, and the arrears in rent owed to the City—all of these matters came to
a head by the mid- 1720 s, made all the more pressing by the evidence that street
crime was as serious as it had ever been. One can detect by then a clear shift in
the attitudes of at least some of those in positions of authority in the City towards
the usefulness of street lighting. The experience over three decades had demon-
strated that the financial arrangements set up to support the new oil lamps in
1694 and renewed in 1715 were simply not flexible enough to underpin the kind
of expanded, public, lighting service that was coming to seem necessary by the
third decade of the eighteenth century. The disputes in the 1720 s over the com-
pany’s inability to collect what subscribers owed and the City’s inability to col-
lect their rent from the company were but surface manifestations of the more
basic problem that the lighting provided by the Convex Lights Company was
218 Policing the Night Streets
(^158) CLRO, fo. 289. On the question of whether the Common Council could change the established
procedure with respect to convictions of defaulters, Dee predictably said no, they must only go before the
lord mayor in the ancient way, whereas Thomson said: ‘The Common Council have altered from time
to time the methods and orders relating to the Lights and may again if they think other methods more
proper not only as to the penaltys but the way of levying them also.’ Ibid., fo. 290.