On track for a city charter

Mayor of London Boris Johnson looks to the capital's history to make the case for developing a City Charter fit for the 21st century

To appreciate the importance of the City Charter, and why we need this concordat, we must cast our minds back to 1901 when the London borough of Croydon was at the forefront of a technological revolution.

Amid wild excitement the people of London welcomed the first tram onto our streets and the idea spread so fast that by the Whitsun holiday of 1903 London trams carried 800,000 people everyday.

It was so obvious that the electric tram was the transport mode of the future London County Council (LCC) began to promote a great network of trams that would enable tired overcrowded inner city workers to migrate to the suburbs for the benefit of their health.

It was, however, at this point that the visionaries of the central metropolitan authority encountered a problem, a democratic problem, that would have been frankly unthinkable in Tsarist Russia or France or any other European great power.

Under the terms of the 1870 Tramways Act it was the boroughs, and not London County Council, who controlled the roads and therefore the tracks on which the trams would run. The result was that when the LCC went to the City of London and the West End to ask if they could lay down tracks they were told in no uncertain terms to 'hop it'.