Page 16 - Mansfield 2019/20

A pioneering Settlement
Mansfield’s proud tradition of helping disadvantaged groups goes back to its Victorian inception. Here Timothy MM Baker (Corpus Christi, 1979) reveals the roots, the growth and the legacy of Mansfield House University Settlement in east London.
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Almost as soon as Mansfield College was established in
the late 19th century, it became active in the University Settlement movement, bringing practical help to London’s poor. Mansfield’s focus was Canning Town, then one of London’s newest and poorest slums. The pastor of the local Congregational Church, Frederick Newland, invited Mansfield students to spend fortnights working there during vacations. This practice was supported by Principal Andrew Fairbairn and Mansfield student Will Reason, and formalised in 1890 with the foundation of Mansfield House: the third University Settlement, and the first to be Nonconformist. Canning Town Women’s Settlement followed in 1892.
The Settlers’ energy, and their impact on the life of Canning Town and the wider world, was prodigious. Their achievement still influences British administrative and social structures today.
Canning Town was a new port and industrial suburb of West Ham, which had a long history of Nonconformity. After 1844 West Ham became ‘London over the border’, the closest district to the booming metropolis without controls over polluting industry and housing quality. Its Thames-side marshes, beside London’s main commercial artery, were ripe for exploitation. The Royal Docks became London’s main port, and a magnet for factories producing chemicals and foodstuffs, along with electrical telegraphs, gasworks, ironworks, and shipyards.
Just inland, Canning Town sprang up to house dockers and labourers, who flocked from all over London and Essex seeking new opportunities. Housing was cheap, shoddy, densely packed; drainage inadequate; and amenities sparse. Casual and sweated labour, insecurity, exploitation, and poverty prevailed. A working- class boom town, heavily dependent on pubs for recreation, it was London’s ‘Wild East’. When the College Bursar viewed premises for Mansfield House’s first ‘residence’, he encountered a drunken bar brawl fought with ginger beer bottles.
Canning Town attracted missions from all denominations.
My great-great-grandfather Thomas Perfect founded its Congregational Church in 1859, offering practical charity, education, and social activity, as well as pastoral support: ‘one of the few people who lived what he preached’, his daughter recalled.