For almost a century, between 1771 and 1865, the Paving Commissioners were the principal local authority in Oxford. Like many similar statutory authorities across the country, they were established to resolve the age-old urban challenges of maintaining the streets, keeping them clean and free of obstructions, and lighting them on dark winter nights. They were, however, more ambitious than most such bodies in seeking to create a central market to replace street markets and in their determination to rebuild and reshape the approaches to Magdalen Bridge. They also differed from all the other authorities, except of course Cambridge, in bringing Town and Gown together after centuries of rivalry to work in the common cause of urban improvement. The Oxford Paving Commissioners therefore comprised the vice-chancellor and other officers of the university, heads of colleges and professors as well as the mayor, senior councillors and town hall officials. Meetings on seemingly mundane issues were chaired by a Doctor of Divinity, and the Master of University College might be asked to check whether a footway had been properly made.

This volume covers the first thirty years of the Oxford Paving Commissioners, the period between 1771 and 1801 during which they carried out their most transformative interventions in the city. The terminal date was initially chosen to match that of Oxford Council Acts, 1752–1801 edited by M.G. Hobson (Oxford Historical Society, New Series vol. 15), but 1801 also proved to be the year in which the Paving Commissioners completed the regular building line from High Street to Magdalen Bridge which their surveyor, John Gwynn, had envisaged back in 1771. By the early nineteenth century, the Paving Commissioners were largely focused on repair and maintenance, and ensuring that their hard-won improvements were not compromised by encroaching development. They recaptured some of their original dynamism by undertaking three street-widening projects in St Aldate's between the 1830s and 1850s, the first one opposite Christ Church for aesthetic reasons, and the others to cope with increasing traffic from the Folly Bridge wharves and, later, from the railway station opened in 1844. Their apparently sweeping powers proved unequal, however, to the challenges posed by Oxford's fast-growing population in the 1820s and 1830s. Water supply remained the responsibility of two separate waterworks, one managed by the city council and the other by the university, leaving the

Paving Commissioners unable to intervene.