The 'Agitator of the Metropolis': Charles Cochrane and Early-Victorian Street Reform
Abstract
The 'Agitator of the Metropolis': Charles Cochrane and Early- Victorian Street Reform JAMES WINTER HE main current of street refor~. in the early decades of the nineteenth cen.tury was directed at clearing away obstructions from the path of horse-drawn wagons and carriages, at making that path into a smooth surfaced, well regulated conduit. Such an object was by no means new in this period; the hundreds of burghers who sat on paving and drainage boards, parish vestries or the City corporation and commission of sewers had considered this their main duty since at least the mid-eighteenth century. What was peculiar about the 1830s and' 40s was a new sense of urgency, of crisis. Spectacular growth, the ringing of the central city by railway goods yards, the quickening movement from the centre to the suburbs had vastly and rapidly increased the already notorious jam of road traffic. At the same time the acquisition of a metropolitan police force and advances in paving and draining technology had suggested that there might be solutions - often the first step in the discovery of problems. At the same time a counter-current was beginning to run strongly in the 1840s: a wish to make