12 - ‘The soul of the community’: two practitioners reflect on history, place and community in two communitybased practices from 1980 to 1995: St Hilda’s Community Centre in Bethnal Green and Waterloo Action Centre in Waterloo, South London

Summary

Introduction

This chapter offers a perspective on the Settlement House Movement in a more contemporary light. It draws on the reflections of two practitioners who worked in two community organisations in the 1980s and 1990s and on data from interviews with former community workers, residents and volunteers in these organisations on communitybased practices in London during the period 1980 to 1995. The two organisations are St Hilda's Community Centre in Bethnal Green in the East End of London (St Hilda’s), which was one of the original settlements created in the 1880s, and Waterloo Action Centre (WAC) in South London, which came out of Blackfriars Settlement and the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in the same period.

Community development and community social work were very much part of mainstream social work practice in the 1980s and 1990s, supported by local authorities and integrated into social work education. In the UK, community development and community-based social work has now been largely lost from both mainstream statutory social work practice and from social work education. Mainstream social work practice has become focused on individual casework (Stepney and Popple, 2008). Community social work and community development in the UK now takes place mainly within third sector and voluntary organisations. Our key objective of this chapter is to document community-based social work practice within these two community-based organisations and illustrate its considerable contemporary value to the communities that they serve.

The 1980s and 1990s were a period of profound social change in the UK. This period witnessed the advent of the privatisation of public services under the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher; the miners’ strike of 1984 whereby the state sought to curb the power of trade unions; the initiation of the ‘right to buy’ (a government policy that enabled council tenants to buy their property at a discounted rate); radical community development; and anti-racist and anti-fascist movements – much of it coming from the East End of London. Moreover, feminist organising, including Greenham Common and the squatters’ movement, were especially important in London, an area of exceptionally expensive housing. It is useful to see considerable links with this wider ecology in the development of social work within the two organisations discussed in this chapter.