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While the ideals of the police regulation of urban order in nineteenth-century Britain have received significant scholarly attention, there has been limited engagement with how this type of policing operated in practice. By examining for the first time 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 article emphasises the critical role of this legal language in the exercise of police power over urban space. The late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries is revealed as a formative period in the development of anxieties around ordering the urban sphere, in which the legal categories ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’ evoked powerful concerns. It argues that the police regulation of urban order by targeting the ‘suspicious characters’ who threatened it is a deep structure of policing, which merits further examination to understand deep-rooted police stereotyping practices.

‘Lurking’ and ‘loitering’: the genealogy of languages of police suspicion in Britain