Before Peel took control of the streets with his band of merry, blue men, there were The Bow Street Runners, a notorious force founded in 1749 by a magistrate, Henry Fielding. Their job was to patrol London but the problem was there were only six of them in total and they only patrolled the Westminster area, guarding the government hierarchy, which proves how riotous and criminally infested the rest of unpatrolled London must have been until Robert Peel levelled the playing field by extending the police patrols further afield. Opposition politicians are always complaining of not enough police officers on our streets but hey, there’s now more than six so things have improved.
To continue reading this chapter click on this absolutely stunning picture I painted not unlike Munch.
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