Controlling a Complex Metropolis, 1650–1750: politics, parishes and powers (original) (raw)

The period from 1650 to 1'750 was not one characterised by major institutional innovation in the government of London, let alone revolutionary structural change. The contrast between the centralised and well-organised government of the City and the atomised and somewhat improvised governmental institutions of the rest of the metropolis was as striking at the end of the period as it was at the beginning. Though the constitutional framework of the corporation by which the City was governed was undoubtedly the focus of considerable contest and controversy, there was in the event little lasting change. Nor was there real change to the situation outside the City, where responsibility for local government was shared by parish vestries and justices. However serious the problems that this structure, or lack of structure, entailed, they had not yet generated enough urgency or concern to lead to significant reform. However, structural forms are not the only possible locus of change. The nature of government changed and the power relations between national and local government shifted, as did the scope and competence of administrative activity. Many of the characteristic features of today's London's governance emerged or became significant in this period and many aspects of the modern metropolitan experience were formed then.' Themes This paper covers the period stretching from the Civil War of the 1640s, when popular feeling in London sided decisively with Parliament against the Crown, to the 1740s, when, though the capital nourished some Jacobite yearnings, the City establishment effectively backed the Westminster government. The period embraces such episodes on the national stage as the inception and collapse of the republic and the Cromwellian protectorate, the Glorious Revolution of 1 688-9, the effective establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty, and Britain's commitment to a series of major foreign and colonial wars and the building of an empire. It saw the capital's population grow by half or two-thirds again, from some 400,000 in 1650 to 675,000 in 1'750.* It also saw this population decimated by the last great epidemic of the European age of plague in 1665, when 69,000 people died. London made a remarkable recovery from this and from the Great Fire of 1666 that devastated the core of the walled city, centre of commerce and trade. The Fire resulted in a rebuilding of the city to new standards of space and amenity, but it may also have encouraged the westward spread of retail, entertainment and service industries. Over the period 1650 to 1'750 London sprawled more widely, to east and west, and north and south of the river and by the time ofJohn Rocque's map of 1746, the continuously