The Metropolitan Police Force Surveyorship was established in 1842; the force's first purpose-built station was built at Bow Street, erected two years after Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. There was a boom in police stations during the 1880s following the political unrest of that decade and high-profile events such as the Whitechapel Murders. Cherry, O'Brien and Pevsner, in their London: East volume of the Buildings of England series, record Dixon Butler's "unique" riverside police stations for the Thames River Police, founded in 1798 to combat piracy, including his station at Wapping which now houses the Thames River Police Museum.
