Dr Eleanor Bland

While the ideals of the police regulation of urban order in nineteenth-century Britain have received significant scholarly attention, there has been limited engagement with how this type of policing operated in practice. By examining for the first time the evolution and genealogy of ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’, two legal terms that formed a prominent part of the police language of suspicion from the later eighteenth century, this article emphasises the critical role of this legal language in the exercise of police power over urban space. The late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries is revealed as a formative period in the development of anxieties around ordering the urban sphere, in which the legal categories ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’ evoked powerful concerns. It argues that the police regulation of urban order by targeting the ‘suspicious characters’ who threatened it is a deep structure of policing, which merits further examination to understand deep-rooted police stereotyping practices.

‘Flash houses’, a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived ‘criminal underworld’, and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty and criminality, which were central to the early-19th century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants’ morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders.

This article provides a fresh perspective on the popular political culture of the City of London between approximately 1725 and 1746. While many scholars have recognized that the City was a vital and vibrant arena for popular political engagement throughout the long eighteenth century, they have mostly chosen to emphasize the role that London citizens played in national political narratives. Instead, this article takes as its starting point elections to the Common Council of the City Corporation. These reveal powerful internal dialogues, which emerged from the lowest levels of City government in the 1720s and 30s. Householders raised concerns about corruption in government, and about the accountability of elected representatives; these ideas were forged and sharpened in the neighbourhoods of the City. This article reveals the vitality of popular political activism in the streets and alleys of the City of London.