A settlement requires a place, a locality. Pembroke House, like other Cambridge sponsored missions and settlements is in South London, in Walworth, part of the London Borough of Southwark.
The history is a bit hazy, but there are indications that at its inception Pembroke served the streets around the settlement house in Tatum Street. There is little written about the geography of settlements. A reasonable aspiration might have been a parish, of which there are 10,500 in England, serving a mean population of 5,300, but with a range from a few hundred to several thousand.
Walworth is named in the Domesday book but the geography is unclear. The two electoral wards North Walworth and Faraday is as good a guide as any, an area that takes in Elephant and Castle to the North, stops short of Burgess Park to the South, the Old Kent Road to the East, and the Thameslink railway running parallel to Walworth Road to the West.
Roughly 25,000 people live in these two wards, and the population is rising. There is a lot of data about poverty, mental ill-health, exclusion from school and unemployment, but not much about how people go about their lives and resolve problems without recourse to state sponsored help.
What would be a natural catchment area for a settlement? Walking distance is one indicator. A fit and healthy person takes 20 minutes to get to Tatum Street from Elephant and Castle, and 10 to 15 minutes from Burgess Park.
At present the words ‘Walworth Triangle’ appear in the application forms that Pembroke House submit to funders, an area that cuts from the North Walworth and Faraday wards Elephant and Castle, Burgess Park and the narrow strip of housing between the Thameslink line and Walworth Road.