1,000 officers. Corruption was rife among this early batch of recruits, so much so that five-sixths of the original force had been dismissed within four years. London's urban area grew rapidly, spreading into Islington, Paddington, Belgravia, Holborn, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Southwark and Lambeth. With London's rapid growth, towards the middle of the century, an urgent need arose to reform London's system of local government. Outside of the City of London, which resisted any attempts to expand its boundaries to encompass the wider urban area, London had a chaotic local government system consisting of ancient parishes and vestries, working alongside an array of single-purpose boards and authorities, few of which co-operated with each other. Drainage in the city was handled by 7 different Commissions of Sewers, and in a one-hundred square yard area of Central London there were four different bodies responsible for the pavement and upkeep of the streets. In 1855 the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) was created to provide London with adequate infrastructure to cope with its growth. The MBW was London's first metropolitan government body. The Metropolitan Board of Works was not a directly elected body, which made it unpopular with Londoners. In 1888 it was wound up, and replaced with the London County Council (LCC). This was the first elected London-wide administrative body. The LCC covered the same area as the MBW had done, but this area was designated as the County of London. In 1900, the county was subdivided into 28 metropolitan boroughs, which formed a more local tier of administration than the county council. Parliament also took a more proactive role in public health and healthcare during the latter part of the century. In 1867 it passed the London-specific Metropolitan Poor Act, creating the Metropolitan Asylums Board and six new Metropolitan Asylum Districts in London. The Act was intended to move the provision of healthcare for the poor away from the workhouse infirmaries, whose conditions attracted much public scorn, and into six new hospitals. Only two of these, in Central London and the Poplar and Stepney District, were fully realized, with the other four districts using reconstituted facilities from the old infirmaries because of cost overruns. Sanitation One of the first tasks of the Metropolitan Board of Works was to address London's sanitation problems. Sewers were far from extensive, and the most common form of human waste disposal was cesspools, some 200,000 by mid-century, which