London streets were once dangerously disorderly even by day

Evidence

No member of Parliament would now venture to say that it was dangerous to walk in the streets of London by day or night … Bad as the dens of infamy in London still are, they are not to be compared with those older places of hideous profligacy … In the most disorderly part of the town, such as St. Giles, Covent Garden, and Holborn, the streets every Sunday morning exhibited the most outrageous scenes of fighting, drunkenness and depravity … Crimes, too, are greatly diminished in atrocity. The large gangs of desperate robbers, thirteen or fourteen in number, now no longer exist … — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 339

Categorization

• XREF: Documents the shift toward the modern city’s policed public space — background for how urban order came to protect the observing self.