Melbourne, Middlesbrough and morality: policing Victorian ‘new towns’ in the old world and the new

On the surface, there could be few greater contrasts to the early twentieth-century
observer of urban development in Britain and its dominions than that between ‘marvellous’
Melbourne . . . the [golden] Metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere’, in the new world of
south-east Australia, and Middlesbrough, that grim, utilitarian ‘Ironopolis’, in the old world
of north-east England. On closer inspection there were certain commonalities that make
useful a comparison between the two in the early and mid-Victorian period. The focus of
this article is narrow – the creation of uniformed police forces and their role in the
creation of a well-ordered society in two dramatically expanding new towns – but forms
part of a wider set of issues relating to the development of urban governance in the
nineteenth century.