Metropolitan Board of Works

The Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) was the upper tier of local government for what later became Inner London between 1856 and 1889, primarily responsible for upgrading infrastructure. It also had a parks and open spaces committee which set aside and opened up several landmark parks. The metropolis which the board served included substantial parts of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent throughout the 33 years leading up to the advent of county councils. This urban zone lay around the medieval-sized City of London. Plans to enact a similar body had failed in 1837, but Parliament finally passed the Metropolis Management Act 1855, which dissolved a short-lived building office and a sewers commission, and made the Board effective as of December that year. The Board endured until it was succeeded by the directly elected London County Council in March 1889.

Its principal responsibility was to provide infrastructure to cope with the rapid growth of the metropolis, which it accomplished with varying degrees of success. The MBW was co-opted from boards, districts of vestries who were elected by their ratepayers rather than directly elected, but which during its period were separated into civil parishes, removing many residual Church of England ties. It was accountable to Parliament but not to a particular ministry to supervise accounts. This democratic deficit vexed critics and rate-paying Londoners, especially after its budget grew and some of its members and staff engaged in embezzlement, bribery and breach of fiduciary duty (unfair contract procurement and mismanagement). However, the creation of county councils across the country on its demise indicated a widespread recognition of the advantages of the economies of scale available from uniting districts in procuring, improving and maintaining energy, street lighting, fire fighting, sanitation and transport, in the same way as large, well-funded, democratic, ministerially and accounting-regulated municipal corporations had since 1835.

The growth of the city around the commercial City of London was continuing apace; as the British Empire grew so the London Docks had grown in trade, population sharply grew and demand for housing rose as did the building of homes. Half of the population of two of the three counties that adjoined that medieval-walled city definition were within a few miles of it. However the government of this metropolis was chaotic, with over 100 key authorities having statutory or customary powers and much overlapping territory. Specifically, providing a rate-paid service or capital improvement in a given place sometimes needed the co-ordination or consent of many of these.

In 1835 elected municipal boroughs had been set up covering every major city except London. The City of London, the very core of the sprawling metropolis which keeps its medieval boundaries, was untouched by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 and resisted all moves to expand its borders to include the generally poorer districts surrounding it. This meant that commissions (justices) of the peace of three counties, key landowners, and powerful parish council vestries beneath them, had authority over the clearly urban area, the metropolis: Middlesex north of the Thames and west of the Lea up to several miles from the City, Surrey to the south and south-west, and Kent as to the south east.

In 1837 an attempt was made to set up an elected authority covering the whole of the metropolis; however, the wealthier districts of Marylebone and Westminster resisted this, as some of their own local powers and low rates would have been lost. They defeated the motion. In 1854 the Royal Commission on the Corporation of the City of London proposed to divide an urban area around the City of London into seven boroughs, each represented on a Metropolitan Board of Works. This proposal was abandoned, but the next year the board of works was set up to cover all this.

To empower this body to coordinate work to plan and build infrastructure of the metropolis, Parliament passed the Metropolis Management Act 1855 which created the Metropolitan Board of Works (which took over the responsibilities of the short-lived Metropolitan Buildings Office and Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, established in 1845 and 1848 respectively). It covered "the Metropolis", the area designated London in the 1851 census (an enlarged variant of the Bills of mortality area fixed in 1726), the alternative proposals had been the Metropolitan Police District; the coal tax area; or that used for the Metropolitan Interments Act 1852.

It was not to be a directly elected body, but instead to consist of members nominated by the vestries who were the principal local authorities. The larger vestries had two members and the City of London had three. A few vestries were for tiny parishes who co-convened into a district board for nominating members to the MBW. There were 45 members, who would then elect a Chairman who was to become a member ex officio. The first nominations took place in December and the Board held its first preliminary meeting on 22 December 1855 where John Thwaites was elected as chairman. The board formally came into being on 1 January 1856 when it took over the powers, duties and liabilities of the Commission of Sewers and the Buildings Office.

A major problem was sewage: most of London's waste was allowed to flow into the Thames resulting in a horrendous smell in the summer months. In 1855 and 1858 there were especially bad summers with the latter being known as "The Great Stink". A notable achievement of the Board was the creation of the core London sewerage system, including 82 miles (132 km) of main and 1,100 miles (1,800 km) of street sewers, which solved the problem. A large part of the work of the MBW was under the charge of the Chief Engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, previously engineer with the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers. William Dibdin, chief chemist for the MBW, conceived the biological treatment of sewage to oxidize the waste.