In general terms, the subject of Katherine Bradley's well-researched study is ‘the changing relationship between voluntary organisations, their client groups and the state’. For illustrative purposes, however, she focuses on the development of the university settlement movement during the period from 1918 to 1979. Just over 20 years ago, I reviewed Standish Meachum's (Reference Meachum1987) excellent book on Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880–1914 for The Times Literary Supplement (Pinker, Reference Pinker1988: 336). At the time, I noted with regret that his account stopped short at 1914. There was, I suggested, much more of interest to be told about the subsequent history of Toynbee Hall and the settlement movement. And now – 20 years on – Bradley's highly informative study has filled this long-standing gap in the history of British voluntary sector welfare services.

The idea of establishing university settlements in London's impoverished East End was first mooted by Canon Samuel Barnett, a charismatic Christian social reformer and leading member of the Charity Organisation Society. Barnett believed that young university graduates should go and live in these deprived neighbourhoods where they would make friends with the local people, give something back to society and learn at firsthand what it was like to be poor.

Barnett conceptualised the settlement movement as a moral crusade directed towards regenerating deprived urban communities and transforming the demoralised poor into socially aware and proactive citizens. It would achieve this end by fostering new bonds of mutual respect and fellowship between those who gave and those who received help.

This was the message that Barnett brought to Oxford in 1883 when he was invited to speak at St John's College. Years later, a student who attended that meeting recounted how ‘Barnett came down and preached in our college hall, and the whole university laid hold of his idea and understood . . . men saw in his settlement proposal exactly the opportunity which their gathering interest in the problems of poverty demanded for its exercise and fulfilment’ (Vincent and Plant, Reference Vincent and Plant1984: 133).

Barnett's proposal was enthusiastically taken up by a small but highly influential group of scholars at Balliol, including the College Master, Benjamin Jowett, and the idealist philosopher, T. H. Green. They raised the funds needed to build a settlement house in Whitechapel, which was named in memory of their late friend and academic colleague, Arnold Toynbee. It was not long before other Oxford and Cambridge colleges were sponsoring their own settlement projects.

Toynbee Hall was formally opened in 1885, a few months after Oxford House, which was closely linked with Keble College. By 1911, there were over 40 fully operative university settlements in London alone. Successive generations of young graduates – including William Beveridge, R H Tawney and Clement Attlee – were to serve as sub-wardens engaged in a burgeoning range of social, cultural and educational activities.

Lady Margaret Hall recruited most of its sub-wardens from the women's university colleges of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Bradley describes how most of the work of the settlement movement at this time was undertaken ‘in highly gendered ways’. As she notes, ‘men's settlements tended towards the provision of clubs and adult education, whilst women's settlements placed a greater emphasis on meeting the health needs of women and young children’.

Health and well-being, citizenship, the law, and immigration and community relations are the four main issues of social concern around which Bradley structures her review of the settlement movement's activities and achievements between 1918 and 1979.

As the scale and diversity of statutory welfare provision increased throughout this period, the settlements had to ‘tailor their work to the availability of funding’. Statutory bodies were generally reluctant to fund voluntary sector initiatives on a long-term basis. The settlements were notably successful in providing supportive services to families with disabled children and elderly people with needs left unmet by the statutory sector. They were less successful in their attempts at inculcating the values of citizenship in the young people who joined their youth clubs with other more engaging pursuits in mind.

None of the settlements was able to secure the long-term funding they needed to sustain their after-care and befriending services for ex-offenders and probationers. By the late 1940s, the state had assumed primary responsibility for these and other related activities.

By contrast, the settlements became key providers of legal advice and advocacy services from the 1950s onwards. Their clientele included a growing number of ordinary people engaged in disputes with statutory service providers, private landlords, hire purchase companies, employers – and with each other. This, however, was a service sector from which the statutory agencies were disengaging. In 1950, free legal aid was available to 80 per cent of the population. By 1959, the eligibility criteria had become so stringent that only the poorest people had access to free legal aid.

In her final chapter, Bradley reviews the track record of the settlements in the field of community relations and notably with regard to the changing ethnic and religious composition of the localities they served. She focuses primarily on Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel area, the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936 and the Brick Lane race riots of 1978. As she notes, this was a neighbourhood which was ‘predominantly Jewish in 1918 and, by the end of our period, Bengali’. Bradley concludes that, in their response to these challenges, the largely ‘middle-aged and middle-class people’ who headed up the leadership of Toynbee ‘were often paternalistic and not always able or willing to accept that their expertise could fall short of what was required’. Meachum said much the same about the founding members of the settlement movement. In his view, they never succeeded in reconciling their paternalistic styles of leadership with their professed commitment to fostering the values of fellowship and mutual respect.

Bradley's excellent study stops short at 1979. By all accounts, Toynbee Hall and the other surviving settlements have become much more democratic and egalitarian since then. So we need yet another study that brings the story up to date and explains how this transformation came about. Dr Bradley is manifestly well qualified to write it.