LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Cambridgeshire

During the Middle Ages the Bishops of Ely had their London palace on the land that is now occupied by Ely Place. Legally, the property was part of Cambridgeshire, which lies over 40 miles to its north. The Chapel of St Ethelreda's was built in 1293 as a private chapel for the bishops.

In 1754 Matthias Mawson the Bishop of Ely took up residence at No. 23 Kensington Square. In 1762 the final Lord Hatton died. The property reverted to the Crown. By a Private Act of 1772 Edmund Keene the Bishop of Ely sold his interest in the property to it. The money received was used buy a freehold property in Dover Street to act as the official diocesan residence. The property continued to be administered as part of Cambridgeshire. It is run by six commissioners.

Location: Ely Place, EC1N 6RY (purple, red)

Website: www.elydiocese.org www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk

The Strawberry Fayre

The Strawberry Fayre is annual charity fair that is held in Ely Place around about the time of the Feast of St Ethelreda in June. Father Kit Cunningham (1931-2010) of St Ethelreda's named it in reference to the renowned strawberries that used to be grown in the gardens on the property. In William Shakespeare s play Richard III the Duke of Gloucester asks the Bishop of Ely to fetch some strawberries from the estate.

See Also: FAIRS

County Boundaries

Boxing bouts were often arranged to be held in fields close to the junction of three counties borders. That was so the forces of law could be evaded by moving from one county to another.

Greater London Assembly

City Hall is the home of the Greater London Assembly, the regional governmental body that operates between the central government and the London borough councils. It has London-wide responsibility for areas such as culture, economic development and regeneration, environment, fire and emergency planning, land use, policing, and transport.

The Greater London Assembly was set up under the Greater London Assembly Act of 1999. The first elections to the Assembly were held in 2000.

The City Hall building was designed by the Foster & Partners. In large part, the building's shape was derived from concerns about heat within the building and shadow outside of it. The architects starting point was a sphere, the shape with the maximum content to the minimum surface area. This meant that heat loss would be lessened during cold periods as would heat gain during sunny ones. From this point, the shape was tilted southwards so as to lessen the amount of surface that the building presented to the Sun. In addition, this meant that it would cast less of a shadow over the riverside. The resulting building is not held in any particular warmth by the public.

The Assembly vacated the building in 2021.

Location: City Hall, Kamal Chunchie Way, E16 1ZE

City Hall, The Queen's Walk, SE1 2AA¹

Website: www.london.gov.uk

¹. In taxi slang City Hall is known as The Wobbly Jelly .

The Greater London Council

In 1965 the Greater London Council (G.L.C.) succeeded the London County Council (L.C.C.). County Hall became the headquarters of the new London-wide local government. De facto London - the contiguous urban sections of Essex, Kent, and Surrey, and the whole of the county of Middlesex - became de jure London. (The City of London was unaffected by these changes.)

The G.L.C. members were elected for seats that had the same boundaries as London s Parliamentary constituencies.

The advent of the G.L.C. was to lead to Labour losing the monopoly on the city government that it had enjoyed since the 1930s. However, the party did continue to have periods of controlling the new body.

Within the Council there soon came to exist a degree of tension between the old, L.C.C. boroughs and the new, outer ones. The flow of money tended to give the impression that the suburbs were subsidising the inner city. The G.L.C. had varying relations with the 32 boroughs that existed within its borders. In part, this stemmed from the Council's vision being city-oriented rather than locally-focussed. It also arose from the fact that at any given point whichever party controlled the Council the other party would control many of the boroughs. The most vehement struggles tended to be between the G.L.C., when it was Labour-controlled, and the outlying Conservative boroughs.

Road planning was a pawn in the relationship between central government and local government. One of the reasons for the creation of the Council had been that Whitehall had felt that the L.C.C. had lacked the unitary scale to allow for effective road planning. It was easier for central government to deal with one council rather than with twenty. However, the G.L.C. went native and took to promoting the anti-road, pro-housing views of the people that it represented. The mandarins had a number of its functions transferred to less obstreperous bodies.

In 1981 the G.L.C. again became Labour controlled. Soon afterwards there was a coup within the party that resulted in Ken Livingstone replacing Andrew McIntosh as its head and thus the Leader of the G.L.C.. The action was possible the former had proven to be capable of creating alliance of interests that peripheral to the party mainstream. As a result, the Council started to promote a series of marginal interests. It proved to be highly adept at baiting the national government, something that was accentuated by the fact that County Hall faces the Palace of Westminster diagonally across Westminster Bridge. By the mid-1980s the city had become highly politicised. The Council enjoyed considerably more popularity with London's populace than did the government. The Tories allies in the national press seized upon every opportunity to distort the minutiae of the first rumblings of political correctness to portray the G.L.C. and its allied inner city boroughs as being concerned only with nursing the interests of the diverse minority groups that had helped elect the Council's Labour majority. That the G.L.C. functioned was due to the fact that its core activities were supervised by high calibre public administrators such as Maurice Stonefrost.

In 1986 the Conservative government abolished the G.L.C.. The County Hall building was sold off to a private business. The company's tenants have included a hotel and a variety of visitor attractions.

Location: County Hall, Queen's Walk, SE1 7PB

The London County Council

In 1889 the London County Council (L.C.C.) superseded the Metropolitan Board of Works. The Council covered not only the Board's domain but also received additional sections of Middlesex, Kent, and Surrey. The L.C.C. was the first metropolitan authority to be directly elected by Londoners. The 5^th Earl of Rosebery served as the body's inaugural Chairman.

The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 empowered the authority to provide housing for the city's poor. The first two estates were Boundary Street, which was built on the Old Nichol, and Millbank (just to the west of the Tate Britain).

The Council inherited the Board's offices in Spring Gardens.¹ In 1905 it resolved to acquire new premises. The County Hall site was purchased, it having been previously something of an eyesore that had consisted largely of small factories and wharves.

But for an interlude in 1895-8, the Liberals (or Progressives) controlled the Council from its formation until 1907. The elections of that year were bitterly contested and ended in the return to power of the Conservatives (or Municipal Reformers). They controlled the body until 1934. They closed its Works department and stopped the Thames steamboats.

In 1912 the Council was able to move into County Hall. A decade later the building was officially opened although construction work on it was to continue until 1963. In 1930 the L.C.C. took over the supervision of London's Poor Law institutions and hospitals.

Four years later the Labour Party won outright control of the L.C.C. for the first time. Herbert Morrison was able to use London as a base from which to turn himself into a figure of national importance. During the next five years nearly 85,000 new houses were built. This had political overtones because council tenants were more likely to vote for Labour than for the Conservatives.

Location: 10 Spring Gardens, SW1A 2BN (purple, turquoise)

County Hall, Queen's Walk, SE1 7PB

¹. To the south-west of Trafalgar Square.

Manors

A manor is a variably sized area of land in which particular variable rights exist, these privileges vary from instance to another. Often a manor area's will have a degree of overlap with a parish. The Metropolitan Board of Works purchased lordships whenever it felt that it was able to justify the return for the money involved. In 1870 the body paid the Maryon-Wilson family 45,000 for the lordship of the Manor of Hampstead.¹

In 2007 the lordship of the Manor of Bermondsey was sold at auction. It fetched 55,000.

¹. This lordship had the right of deodand; in the event of a person committing suicide within the manor's boundaries, all of the belongings of that person's property fell into the ownership of the lord of the manor.

The Metropolitan Board of Works

By the mid-19^thC there was a danger that if London's population did not drown in its own filth then it would be poisoned by diseases that that the detritus harboured. This prompted the establishment of a Citywide form of local government. In 1856 the Metropolitan Board of Works was set up. Originally, the Board had 45 members. Three were appointed by the Common Council of the City of London and the rest either by parish vestries or by district boards. The last were made up of groupings together of small parishes.

The Board had limited powers and its co-existence with the vestries meant that it was continuously subjected to adverse criticism. However, it did secure a number of achievements: it constructed many of the West End's principal avenues, it created a citywide drainage system, it built the Thames Embankment, and it preserved a number of London's open spaces, e.g. Hampstead Heath.

A government investigation led to the 1865 establishment of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, which was placed under the control of the Board. Southwark Park (1869) in Bermondsey was the first park to be opened by the body.

Location: 10 Spring Gardens, SW1A 2BN (orange, yellow)

Vestries

The system of London government outside of the City of London was developed from the parish system. By the 18^thC London parish vestries were acting as secular bodies when they dealt with non-religious matters. As a result, their membership came to include people who were not Anglicans.

Beating The Bounds

Beating the bounds is a practice whereby boys would have the bounds of their parish instilled into them. On a given day each year they would be walked around the edge of the parish and at a number of points a ceremony - such as singing, or the boys whipping a stone or tree with small branches, or indeed the youths themselves being lashed - would be performed in order to help the children remember that site and thus the bounds of their parish.

Location: Boundary Road, NW8 0JB. The road's name derives from it having been built along the boundary between the parishes of Marylebone and Hampstead.

See Also: FOLK TRADITIONS

Ends

When a place name includes the word End , it is usually a reference to the place being at the edge of a parish, i.e. where the parish meets a neighbouring one. Thus, the West End grew out of the western edge of the City of London.

The Bills of Mortality

From the 16^thC on, the Company of Parish Clerks compiled the weekly Bills of Mortality. These were started in response to the impact that the plague had had on public health. They recorded deaths in over a hundred parishes in and around London. The Bills were a means of monitoring the size of the population in London and in the districts near the city.

The Bills of Mortality became a de facto form of greater London. Legislation that dealt with matters which affected the whole of London, and its satellite townships and villages, was often binding within the Bills.¹ An alternative to the Bills for London-related legislation was a stated radius of miles from the city.

Website: www.londonparishclerks.com

¹. In 1836 the Bills of Mortality were superseded by the returns to the Register-General.

Westminster

In 1584 an Act of Parliament replaced the Abbot of Westminster with a Dean and gave Westminster a system of wards.

In 1900 Westminster received its charter as a city. It was composed of eight parishes: St Anne Soho, St Clement Danes, St John the Baptist Savoy, St John the Evangelist Westminster, St Margaret Westminster, St Martin-in-the-Fields, St Mary-le-Strand, and St Paul Covent Garden. The new body also incorporated the Close of Westminster Abbey and the Liberty of the Rolls.

Location: 64 Victoria Street, SW1E 6QP (red, brown)

See Also: HOUSING ESTATES The Right To Buy, Dame Shirley Porter; LIBERTIES; SOHO Sex Shops

Website: www.westminster.gov.uk

David Backhouse 2024