Instead of writing compulsory-purchase provisions into every railway or improvement Bill, Parliament codified them once: notice to treat, valuation by jury or arbitrator, compensation for land taken and for injurious affection, and a three-year limit on the power. The clauses were then incorporated by reference into thousands of special Acts, from railways and docks to waterworks and street improvements. The 1845 code governed British compulsory purchase until the Acquisition of Land Act 1919 and the Compulsory Purchase Act 1965, and was copied throughout the empire.
It supplied the legal machinery for the physical remaking of the industrial city — the railway terminus cut through slum districts, the new arterial street, the municipal reservoir — by making land takings routine, priced and litigable rather than exceptional. Every later expropriation regime in the common-law world, including the improvement trusts of colonial India, works from this template.
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