ABSTRACT
In A Century of Municipal Progress 1835-1935 (1935), John Willis comments in a deceptively simple statement that ‘local legislation consists, in the main, of applying old principles to new facts’.1 Whatever its truth in 1935, or its continuing validity 80 years later, it did not then adequately describe the situation as it had been 80 years earlier in mid-Victorian times. In 1935 the growing – and widely accepted – role of central Government in shaping and regulating local government was long established; in the mid-Victorian era it was not, and while the relative situation was quite quickly evolving, the preeminent national role in the emergence of local government was still played by Parliament rather than by Government.
