Historic approaches to policing suspicious behaviour in Britain and their contemporary resonances, 1780-1850

Despite growing understanding of the police regulation of the urban sphere in nineteenth-century Britain, there is limited understanding of how this type of police was delivered in practice. This research examined the evolution and genealogy of ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’, two legal terms that formed a prominent part of the police language of suspicion from the later eighteenth century. This legal language played a critical role in the exercise of police power over urban space. In the period between 1780 and 1850, the legal terms 'lurking' and 'loitering' evoked powerful and formative contemporary anxieties around urban ordering. This aspect of the research specifically located 'lurking' and 'loitering' within their wider lexical context, providing a framework for understanding the exercise of police power over those identified as 'suspicious persons'.