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This chapter is concerned with private bill legislation in the towns of Newport, West Cowes, and Ryde in the Isle of Wight. It focuses on the three Acts for Newport (1786), West Cowes (1816), and Ryde (1829), where the county Highway Commissioners maintained the roads but not the pavements, and the Town Commissioners exercised jurisdiction over behaviour in the streets. The Acts were intended to repress hooliganism, the breaking of windows, and the discharge of fireworks, and popular sports, like bull-baiting, throwing at cocks, and even bowling hoops and football. They were also intended to remove artisans and labourers into workshops and yards where they would be out of sight, and to drive street vendors of all kinds into formally organised markets, where they would cease to obstruct the highway and could be regulated and taxed.

This chapter discusses the adoption of the Public Health Act of 1848 and the Local Government Act of 1858 in Ryde. In 1847, when parliament was getting to grips with the problem of town improvement and public health, the Ryde Commissioners were obliged to obtain a second Act, which released them from the obligation to pay off one-twentieth of all the money they had borrowed every year. But the Act did nothing to change the composition of the Commissioners. In Ryde, there was a strong feeling that the nonrepresentative system ought to be changed to allow the smaller ratepayers and occupiers a voice in the government of their own. The passage of the Public Health Act of 1848 allowed this feeling an expression. The public health party came to terms with the Commissioners that the local Act would incorporate all the important clauses of the Public Health Act of 1848, including the election of Commissioners. In October 1859, the Ryde Commissioners also adopted the Local Government Act of 1858 to increase their powers of borrowing.

This chapter focuses on the Local Government Act of 1858. It was a versatile piece of legislation, which could be adopted by any representative council, or body of commissioners, and places which already possessed local Acts were allowed, like Ryde, to lay down the law in exchange for the general Act, or, like Ventnor, and to a lesser extent Huddersfield, to pick and choose their way through the clauses of the general Act and the model clauses Acts which were embodied in it, taking what they judged they needed to supplement their present powers. The most important feature of the Act was the recognition of the existence of places like Sandown, which were unable to afford a private Act, and unwilling to subject themselves to a General Board of Health. There was still a huge unrealised potential for self-government, and the Local Government Act promised to refresh parts of the body politic which other Acts of parliament had been unable to reach.