The authority of the City Commission, as distinct from the Metropolitan, for there are two separate Acts, seems to be more strongly defined than that of the others, but the principle is the same throughout. The Metropolitan Act bears date September 4, 1848; and the City Act, September 5, 1848.
The Metropolitan Commissioners have the control over “the sewers, drains, watercourses, weirs, dams, banks, defences, gratings, pipes, conduits, culverts, sinks, vaults, cesspools, rivers, reservoirs, engines, sluices, penstocks, and other works and apparatus for the collection and discharge of rain-water, surplus land or spring-water, waste water, or filth, or fluid, or semi-fluid refuse of all descriptions, and for the protection of land from floods or inundation within the limits of the Commission.” Ample as these powers seem to be, the Commissioners’ authority does not extend over the Thames, which is in the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London; and it appears childish to give men control over “rivers,” and to empower them to take measures “for the protection of land from floods or inundation,” while over the great metropolitan stream itself, from Yantlet Creek, below Gravesend, to Oxford, they have no power whatever.
The Commissioners (City as well as Metropolitan) are empowered to enforce proper house-drainage wherever needed; to regulate the building of new houses, in respect of water-closets, cesspools, &c.; to order any street, staircase, or passage not effectually cleansed to be effectually cleansed; to remedy all nuisances having insanitary tendencies; to erect public water-closets and urinals, free from any charge to the public; to order houses and rooms to be whitewashed; to erect places for depositing the bodies of poor persons deceased until interment; and to regulate the cleanliness, ventilation, and even accommodation of low lodging-houses.
The jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers extends over “all such places or parts in the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex, and Kent, or any of them not more than twelve miles distant in a straight line from St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the City of London, but not being within the City of London or the liberties thereof.”
This, it must be confessed, is an exceedingly broad definition of the extent of the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Commission, giving the Commissioners an extraordinary amount of latitude.
In our days there are many Londons. There is the London (or the metropolitan apportionment of the capital) as defined by the Registrar-General. This, as we have seen, has an area of 115 square miles, and therefore may be said to comprise as nearly as possible all those places which are rather more than five miles distant from the Post Office.
There is the Metropolis as defined by the Post-Office functionaries, or the limits assigned to what is termed the “London District Post.” This London District Post seems, however, to have three different metropolises:—First, there is the Central Metropolis, throughout which there is an hourly delivery of letters after mid-day, and which deliveries are said to be confined to “London.” Then there is the six-delivery Metropolis, or that throughout which the letters are despatched and received six times per day; this is said to extend to such of the “environs” as are included within a circle of three miles from the General Post Office. Then there is the six-mile Metropolis with special privileges. And lastly, the twelve-mile Metropolis, which, being the extreme range of the London District Post, may be said to constitute the metropolis of the General Post Office.
There is, again, the metropolis of the Metropolitan Commissioners of Police, before the region of rural police and country and parish constables is attained; a jurisdiction which covers 96 square miles, as I have shown at pp. [163-166] of the present volume, and reaches—generally speaking—to such places as are included within a circle of five miles and a half from the General Post Office.
There is, moreover, the metropolis, as defined by the Hackney-Carriage Act, which comprises all such places as are within five miles of the General Post Office.