ABSTRACT
The development of urban centres such as London is of crucial significance to the developing history of street crime in British society, precisely because urban living created an ideal setting in which highway robbery could flourish. City life, after all, brought large numbers of people into close proximity with each other, including those with goods worth stealing and those who aspired to separate them from their goods. City life in this respect provided an ideal environment in which motivated offenders would consequently have direct access to suitable and assessable victims. Urban centres also provided venues where knowledge of the craft of street crime could be taught, while also providing a ready marketplace where the goods appropriated could be sold on and distributed to other people. The city landscape, with its winding ways and dim-lit streets, also provided a setting in which street robbery could thrive as an industry. City streets had ideal spaces in which the criminal could hide in wait for a victim, as well as offering the perpetrator an array of inaccessible spaces into which they could escape. The grim urban squalor and rank poverty that defined the living conditions for so many would also provide a fertile environment for street crime in all its forms to flourish.
