ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the great expansion of the urban infrastructure in Victorian Britain. The story is well known with urban areas witnessing a huge number of new waterworks, sewer systems, gasworks and bridges and, towards the end, electricity stations, tramways and schools. The political dimensions of this story for town councils and their elected representatives have received much attention from historians, as have the administrative and policy issues for central government, featuring major personalities like Chadwick and Simon. All historians of the nineteenth century would agree that public health was important; there are two reasons for portraying it as the core activity. Public health was the core activity in the period up to 1900 with its scope closely circumscribed by local wealth and income. The political culture in early nineteenth-century Britain was inimical to central government intervention in aid of local problems.
