ABSTRACT
As David Reeder pointed out in a major historiographical survey in the early 1980s, many contemporaries were convinced that Victorian and Edwardian London remained 'out of step politically [and] not much affected by the radical movements of the century, or, for that matter by the main thrust of the Industrial Revolution'. 2 In terms of control of the environment and maintenance of public health, relatively recently created bodies in the capital frequently found themselves having to cooperate with 'pre-modern' institutions established in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This random mix of the old and new gave rise to a system – or, as many called it, an 'anti-system' – characterized by unparalleled governmental complexity. The Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and (after 1889) the London County Council (LCC), the City, the Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB), Poor Law authorities, voluntary hospitals, the Thames and Lea Conservancy Boards, the Port of London Authority (PLA) – each was individually or jointly responsible for an astonishingly convoluted body of legislative and administrative practice. Until 1904 regulation of the eight private water concerns rested with the notoriously prejudiced company engineers, the Registrar-General's Office (RGO), the Local Government Board (LGB) and the semi-official metropolitan water analyst, the most 47influential of whom was the distinguished chemist Sir Edward Frank-land. 3 Parks and open spaces were individually or jointly controlled by the Crown, the MBW, the LCC, miscellaneous trusts and charities and private individuals or groups of individuals. The task of applying sanitary legislation at local level might appear to fall to the vestries and, after 1900, the boroughs. But in many spheres – inspection of factories and workshops, prosecution of purveyors of adulterated food, antismoke measures and the 'protection of infant life' – responsibility was divided with the MBW in control until 1889, and afterwards the LCC. Little wonder that, confronted by so impenetrable an institutional jungle, reformers repeatedly resorted to the generalized rhetoric of democratic accountability. Castigating the practice of nomination rather than direct election, they insisted that nothing less than a restructuring of the London government system would bestow unity or coherence on day-to-day life in the capital. According to this ubiquitous discourse, the power of the vestries and their successor-bodies – the boroughs – must be radically reduced, thereby making it possible to secure standards as high as those assumed to be in place in urban provincial England. 4 Among major metropolitan authorities in the late nineteenth century only the school board appeared to be moving in the right 'progressive' direction, and, as Brian Simon's contribution to this volume indicates, reformist Londoners had high hopes of an increasingly democraticized educational system. 5 But the school board was also widely cited as an exception which proved the rule: taken as a whole, metropolitan administration conformed to heavily loaded images of amateurism combined with an antediluvian contempt for the spirit of representative control.
