9 - Central goverment and the towns

Summary

THE MUNICIPAL CITY

In 1890 Sidney Webb offered an imaginary but by no means fanciful parable of urban life. He described the movements of ‘the Individualist Town Councillor’ who

will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school hard by the country lunatic asylum and municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park but to come by the municipal tramway, to meet him in the municipal reading room, by the municipal art gallery, museum and library, where he intends to consult some of the national publications in order to prepare his next speech in the municipal town-hall, in favour of the nationalization of the canals and the increase of the government control over the railway system. ‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what’s made our city what it is.

A century later water and gas would be in private hands, the hospital would be managed by an unaccountable trust and the school might have opted out of local authority control. Progress would have seen off the trams, but the buses that replaced them would have been privatised and deregulated. The municipal brooms would have been put out to tender and the surviving local authority services would probably be strictly cash-limited.