Drop the term “settlement houses” into conversation with most people, including political history buffs, and you’re likely to provoke furrowed brows or a cocked head. Yet these institutions numbered in the thousands in the first half of the twentieth century, spanning the United Kingdom, North America, and beyond, giving rise to household names such as Clement Attlee and Jane Addams. The story of the settlement movement is a powerful one, intersecting as it does with the emergence of social work, the concept of universal welfare, free education, trade unionism, suffragism, and community organizing.

I live in one such settlement house – Pembroke House in Walworth, just off the Old Kent Road in South London – that is the only continuously existing settlement house in the United Kingdom that retains all its original features. When I moved in, I soon uncovered a fascinating history and was intrigued to learn that early settlement pioneers had sought answers to questions still very much alive today. Among others: How do we preserve the dynamism of London while giving city dwellers a sense of security? How do we pool collective power to answer neighborhood problems? How can we close the gaps between us that lead to mistrust and social alienation? The history of this nearly forgotten movement and its impact on society is relevant to ongoing dicussions about cross-class solidarity, use of public spaces, and the common good.

A New Kind of Mission

The first settlement houses began appearing in London and across the United States in the 1880s. They shared three main features: a physical building, complete with a residency; a space for worship; and a bustling program of social activities.

What motivated the early settlement founders was the experience of reaching the edge of their knowledge. Propelled by a fervent desire to aid the poor, many of these young, idealistic university graduates were growing conscious of their own ignorance. How could they aid the poor if they knew nothing about them? This recognition prompted students to seek out a space in the slums where they enthusiastically set up shop and got to work, using their money and connections to buy plots of land.

Settlements were set apart from most Christian missions of the time by their commitment to live among the poor. In the words of the slogan of Boston Associated Charities, an organization that helped launch the settlement movement, settlement folk sought to offer “not alms, but a friend.” This approach contrasted with contemporary efforts to “save the souls” of local slum dwellers. Characters found in literature from the time – such as Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House – suggest a growing mid-century awareness that this self-congratulatory approach to “good work” was embarrassing and counterproductive, lacking in solidarity or mutuality.

Settlement workers wanted to demonstrate both their leveling ethos and their commitment; mere proximity to the poor was not enough.  In order to bridge the chasms – financial, social, cultural – between them and their neighbors, they would need a humility that acted as a restraint on the excesses of the past. As Samuel Barnett, with his wife, Henrietta, the founder of Toynbee Hall, put it, “A settlement enables the rich to know the poor in a way not possible for a mission, whose members go about with minds set on their object and who are often held at a distance because of that object.” Guided by a spirit of sharing, they started with their physical space and opened their doors. Settlement houses were, in the most literal sense, public houses before they were anything else.

Nowadays such an approach can make us feel uncomfortable. Settlement workers were products of their background: at times naive, even condescending. They still sometimes lapsed into the language of “the higher is … to give an uplift to a lower.” Yet they were trying to shift the paradigm of their era, moving charity toward social work, beneficence toward welfare, superiority toward solidarity. Taking up residence came at a cost and required a firm commitment: investments were made and roots put down. As a testament to this, many settlements survive to this day.

Dancing, Drumming, and Donkeys

Indeed, a settlement house’s program of activities from over a century ago bears a striking similarity to that of one today. At Pembroke House we still host a lunch club, dance and music classes, and groups for gardening, reading, and drumming. There’s an annual street party, complete with fresh food, live folk music, dancing – and obligatory donkeys. The church still operates out of our large upper hall on Sundays. The residency is currently being reviewed, due to re-open with a new crop of residents.

Underneath this activity is a strong ethos that prioritizes communal bonds and collective self-improvement. Far from a narrow view of education as instruction, settlements have always included music, art, dance, sport, and play. As Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago declared: “It is needless to say that a settlement is a protest against a restricted view of education.” Alongside formal classes, most settlements hosted “smoking room debates” where topics such as animal rights, anarchism, and child labor laws were vigorously discussed. The commitment to political education represented the settlements’ conviction that all classes in society could and should participate in the battle of ideas and in political leadership.

Many of the original settlement houses continue as community centers, doing the same work of convening and connecting. Time and Talents in Bermondsey, Manchester Settlement, and Barton Hill in Bristol still cleave to this original mission,  as do many in North America. However, over time two of the three original pillars of settlement work have vanished for most of these. First, the space for worship has disappeared in this more secular era or, if it remains, is decoupled from other activities. Secondly, to my knowledge only two existing settlements are attemting to retain any form of residency – Pembroke House, where I live and Toynbee Hall, the very first UK settlement, which relaunched its residency after decades only to close it a few years later. If residency, arguably the axis on which the concept of settlements turned, has all but disappeared, what has been lost?

Dropping Anchor in a Neighborhood

The primary insight of the settlement founders was the importance of commitment to the physical space. At Pembroke, our residents’ house is adjoined to the community center, accessible via internal doors so that the two spaces are effectively one. This was deliberate: the residency functioned as a semi-public space, with rooms set aside for social gatherings and activities as well as living quarters for the residents. The social aspect was crucial. As Addams put it, settlements should “add the social function to democracy.” Residents shared their private home with the neighborhood. This intentionally liminal space – between public and private, civic and domestic – required them to navigate tensions that sometimes arose, which in turn echoed the broader societal tension between individual and collective that settlements have always straddled.

At the residency, lines between home and public space are blurred in a generous way. The communal garden is tended by the gardening group but used by residents and others for summer parties, bonfires, and sunbathing, and they’ll help harvest the produce. Residents are first port of call for security, keeping an eye on the center day and night. In return, through their possession of a key, they are understood to have run of the place – within reason. This affords the opportunity to borrow milk from the community center fridge, use the photocopier, or simply show off the space: residents will ostentatiously throw open the door to show visitors the upper hall – a high-roofed, imposing room with sprung floor and stained-glass altar, declaring airily: “… and this is the living room.”

The proximity of the more homey space is valuable to the staff at Pembroke House too. It’s somewhere to store equipment and furniture and somewhere to rest (as when our pregnant priest needed to nap or when staffers had missed the last train), even somewhere to wash  – our showers are on-hand for lunchtime football or on one odd occasion, used to clean a tuba. There are risks, such as when a resident was enjoying some topless sunbathing in the communal garden as the priest invited everyone to enjoy their tea out on the lawn. At other times the informal feeling conjured by the residents de-escalates the potential “us versus them” of staff and community members. I hope my own habit of wandering around in socks made people feel more – not less – comfortable, but as ever, these things are a matter of judgment.

Residents find there’s a validity that comes from being locatable and therefore known by living locally. We are also the stewards of the space, on hand to lock and unlock, giving us a special relationship to the physical site. We see the space in its quietest moments, as well as at its noisiest; we know the fox and her cubs who play in the garden on summer nights and the yowls of our neighbors’ cats. This privileged relationship with the place honors the first hopes of the first settlement founders – that living in a place deepens the bonds forged there.

Somewhat less discussed is the status this gives residents to challenge the authority of settlement staff. Having access to the building means residents can literally transgress the boundaries of the space, such as when residents have used the main halls for party overspill or to play an April Fool’s prank. Unlike typical community centers, where professional staff retain the upper hand, in settlements the residents as keyholders can be subtle disrupters of any power imbalance between settlement staff and locals. This tension at the heart of the organization echoes the founding dilemmas of the settlement, which sought to straddle the dichotomies of public versus private, professional versus local in a way that was deliberately never resolved.

Ripples of the Residency

“Life at Hull House satisfied every longing for companionship, for the excitement of new experiences, for constant intellectual stimulation … being caught up in a big movement for social change which enlisted my enthusiastic loyalty.” —Alice Hamilton, resident at Hull House, Chicago

For me the role of a resident facilitated a more “mixed-in” life, one in which I wasn’t forced to choose between personal and public, between “comer-in” and neighbor. For many, life in London offers a binary choice of “professional life” and “private life” with no in-between. Settlements are rare spaces in which residents have something to do that facilitates their entry into the community. Having relationships across boundaries of class, race, and (most notably) age shifted my perspective on the city. London promised dizzying variety and possibility, yet a corner of Walworth came to stand for something harder to locate: a base, an anchor, and a portal to history.

It is both mindboggling and somehow settling to remember that these buildings have been lived in by people investing in the same activities for over 140 years. The thread of history that runs through these buildings is present when you come across weird artifacts like a suitcase of old photos from a resident’s travels in East Asia, an old church font in the back garden and a rowing oar hanging from the rafters in the living room, reminders of residents who contributed and then went out into the world. To mark Pembroke’s 140^th birthday, an oral history project is now mapping this “residency family tree,” charting the hundreds of individuals who made a home here, changed the neighborhood, and were changed by it.

An Unsettled Legacy

If settlements had such an impact, why have most people never heard of them? One answer is that the idea of settlements was interwoven with similar ideas, becoming lost in the web of mission work, labor rights, and, in the United Kingdom, Fabianism, a distinctly British flavor of socialism with roots in the settlement movement.

Toynbee Hall was the historic meeting place of William Beveridge and Clement Attlee in 1903. Although these two architects of the welfare state met through settlements, the institutions have rarely been credited with its inception. We know from their writings that both Attlee and Beveridge were fundamentally changed by their settlement experiences, cementing their commitment to the sustained, state-sponsored provision of the basics for a good life: health care, social housing, and education.

But both men had retrospective misgivings about how the state came to dominate the conversation on social solidarity, shunting out of the picture those civic institutions from which it had arisen. Beveridge’s later work expressed his anxiety that the state might come to supersede but not truly replace the more intimate work of settlements. As contemporary debates about the importance of neighborhood democracy and local government reflect, attempts to redress this imbalance continue today.

Another aspect that may explain their relative obscurity is the fact that many settlements were staffed predominantly by women. A generation of well-educated, determined middle-class women were set on driving societal change forward. Settlements represented a semi-domestic realm in which women were permitted to exercise some authority. Figures like Jane Addams and Ellen Starr built their own private/public space in which to explore their political instincts and interests. These homes offered opportunity for those women who wanted to move beyond the confines of the private sphere to lay the foundations for what became social work. Radicals, dissidents, and rebels found their home here and the female leadership of these institutions encouraged women into more political roles, such as in labor, antislavery, and suffrage movements, and even into elected office. Honoring the contributions of these women who paved the way for care work to be recognized as legitimate labor and fought for child labor laws and educational reforms is another reason why these incubators of radical politics should never be forgotten.

Permanent, Not Temporary

The enduring themes of settlement work – forging bonds between communities and generations, combatting isolation, and meeting both physical and emotional needs – address issues that are as relevant today as when the movement began. This was particularly striking during the pandemic, when Pembroke House put its buildings to use gathering and distributing food. As settlement founders had discovered in an earlier age, those who came to volunteer were often those who gained most. Those who were helping found that, in the words of Addams, “one gets as much as one gives.”

Drawing out the key characteristics of settlements from which wider civil society can learn, I would point back to the assertations of their founders, who declared that settlements were “permanent, not temporary” and also “constructive, not palliative.” The hierarchical benevolence of the Victorian era was supplanted by a spirit of mutuality and collective self-sufficiency. In place of fixed roles, they have always been places where people are invited to be curious and to reinvent themselves, calling forth new generations of leaders just as they called forth Attlee, Beveridge in the United Kingdom and Addams and Starr in the United States.

Most of all, it is the emphasis on participation, whether teaching chess, leading a drumming workshop, or pruning plants, that binds everyone in a spirit of experimental action and collective endeavor. This boosts confidence, both in ourselves as citizens and in one another’s capacities, and this sense of personal and collective efficacy is an abiding legacy of settlement culture. Once you’ve had a taste of that spirit, it’s hard to let go. Which is why I’m still here, two doors down, seven years in, taking part in an experiment that was launched over 140 years ago and which I hope will be preserved for residents yet to find their home off the Old Kent Road.