Greater London by Nick Barratt

Author:Nick Barratt [Nick Barratt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Building London’s infrastructure: this photograph shows the laying of a new water main by the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company.

Yet further administrative coordination wasn’t entirely stymied and the early 1870s did see a little progress, particularly in the area of education. The 1870 Education Act, as already mentioned, allowed for a School Board for London to oversee the improvement of existing facilities, the building of new schools and the provision of school places for all poor children in the city. Its significance lay not only in the fact that it was allowed to exist as an independent body in the first place, but that it was constituted in a similar way to the Metropolitan Board of Works: it shared the same boundaries and it used the same method of secret ballot and cumulative voting by London’s ratepayers to elect its members. In other words, it seemed to embody a new consensus on how organisations with a wide remit should be constituted.

All this sounds high-minded and promising. It was as though London was inevitably evolving a better form of self-government. Local muddle required central supervision. However, as so often was the case with civic government, what actually brought about a real transformation in London’s administration was not principle or the inexorable march of best practice but scandal. For some time the Metropolitan Board of Works had been accused of corruption and malpractice. Indeed, Board members were so widely believed to be feathering their own nests at London’s expense that their organisation was known in some quarters as the ‘Metropolitan Board of Perks’. Then, in 1886, a real public storm broke.

The particular circumstances that led to the outcry were several years in the making and of Machiavellian deviousness and complexity. Back in 1879 a proposal was put forward that the old Pavilion music hall in Piccadilly Circus should be purchased so that it could be torn down to make way for the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue, one of the Board’s flagship new road schemes. However, until the work actually began, the site was granted a temporary stay of execution and was leased to the music-hall proprietor R. E. Villiers, who paid the Board a regular sum for the use of the site. He also paid an additional sum to F. W. Goddard, the Board’s chief valuer, to ensure he got favourable treatment. When it seemed likely in 1883 that the redevelopment scheme would go ahead, Villiers met with Goddard and his assistant Thomas James Robertson to discuss how he could secure a lease to build a new theatre on the site once the road scheme was completed. In return for his building lease, Villiers agreed to allocate one corner of the site to a certain W. W. Grey (who just happened to be Robertson’s brother), so that he could build a public house there.

In November 1884 the original lease on the site officially came up for renewal and Villiers promptly offered £2,700. The Board quite rightly requested an official valuation, but made

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