The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social connection. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, English classes, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas. The settlement movement also spawned educational/reform movements. Both in the UK and the US settlement workers worked to develop a unique activist form of sociology known as Settlement Sociology. This science of social reform movement is neglected in the history of sociology in favor of a teaching-, theory- and research university–based model.
Toynbee Hall settlement house, founded 1884, pictured here in 1902
Bohemian immigrant youth at the Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House in 1918 in East St. Louis, Illinois
Site of the Communal Club for Working Children, a cornerstone of the Russian Settlement network.
Toynbee Hall is a charitable institution that works to address the causes and impacts of poverty in the East End of London and elsewhere. Established in 1884, it is based in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and was the first university-affiliated institution of the worldwide settlement movement—a reformist social agenda that strove to get the rich and poor to live more closely together in an interdependent community. It was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in the economically depressed East End, and was named in memory of their friend and fellow reformer, Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who had died the previous year.
Toynbee Hall
Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, founders of Toynbee Hall: a portrait by Hubert Herkomer
An East End street in 1902 (Dorset Street, Spitalfields), photographed for Jack London's book The People of the Abyss
Toynbee Hall, circa 1902