We Learn

The settlement movement spread to the United States. Mina Carson explores its development through the work of its leaders, Robert Woods, Mary Simkhovitch, Lillian Wald, Graham Taylor and the great Jane Addams. The reading group looked at two chapters from the book; 4: The Settlers Look Outward: Housing, Health, and Labour and 7: Settlement Work…

Samuel Barnett was vicar of St Jude’s Church in Whitechapel. He and his wife Henrietta developed the idea of a settlement, in his words a form of university extension, in her words a place ‘to learn as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give’. Barnett outlined the idea in a lecture…

Faith was at the heart of both missions and settlements. Church and ministry remain at the core of the Pembroke House. But those establishing settlements were, by definition, foreigners to the community. By most accounts this generated humility. The settlers did not come with an agenda. They listened and learned. This tended to result in…

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…

Settlement’s were the invention of the social reformers Samuel and Henrietta Barnett at the end of the 19th Century. Their ideas spread around the world, and contributed to the formation of the Welfare State (a triumph that, ironically, as we shall see, led to the demise of most settlements). But a small number survive. One,…