Background
London's growth had rapidly accelerated with the increase in railway commuting from the 1830s onwards. However London's local government was chaotic, with hundreds of specialist authorities (few of them elected) representing parts of streets. All had to agree in order to provide services which crossed their boundaries.
In 1835 elected municipal boroughs had been set up covering every major city except London. The City of London, only the very core of the sprawling metropolis, was untouched by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 and resisted all moves to expand its borders to include the poorer inner-city districts surrounding it. This meant that three counties had authority over the metropolitan area: Middlesex covered the area north of the Thames and west of the River Lea, Surrey the area to the south and south-west, and Kent the far south east.
In 1837 an attempt was made to set up a London-wide elected authority, however the wealthier districts of Marylebone and Westminster resisted this and ultimately defeated the move. In 1854 the Royal Commission on the City of London proposed to divide London into seven boroughs, each represented on a Metropolitan Board of Works. The proposal to divide the city into boroughs was abandoned but the board of works was set up in 1855.
Read more about this topic: Metropolitan Board Of Works
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)