Scotland Yard, formally New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police and, by association, a name often used to denote that force. It is located on the River Thames at Victoria Embankment just north of Westminster Bridge in the City of Westminster. The London police force was created in 1829 by an act introduced in Parliament by the home secretary, Sir Robert Peel (hence the nicknames bobbies and peelers for policemen). This police force replaced the old system of watchmen and eventually supplanted the River (Thames) Police and the Bow Street patrols, the latter a small body of police in London who had been organized in the mid-18th century by the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding and his half brother, Sir John Fielding. The original headquarters of the new London police force were in Whitehall, with an entrance in Great Scotland Yard, from which the name originates. (Scotland Yard was so named because it stood on the site of a medieval palace that had housed Scottish royalty when the latter were in London on visits.) When Scotland Yard stationed its first plain clothes police agents on duty in 1842, there was a public outcry against these spies, but the police force gradually won the trust of the London public by the time Scotland Yard set up its Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1878. The CID initially was a small force of plainclothes detectives who gathered information on criminal activities.