ABSTRACT
Imagine a social worker in the midst of nineteenth-century industrialisation confronted by the sudden chaos and bustle of city life with its overcrowded cheek-by-jowl living, its new occupants of vagrants, paupers, prostitutes and street children; its escalating vices of crime, violence and exploitation and the ever-present threat of disease, accident and injury. Imagine her speaking about the logics of an emerging social work practice attuned to the need to bring order, regulation and control to these new exigencies of urban living. London, for example, humanity’s first ‘world’ city had seen its population grow from 3 million in 1861 to 8 million by 1910. The rapid spread of tenement housing brought problems of congestion, poor sanitation and ill health with tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera and typhoid rife in the newly created squalid conditions. Poverty stood side by side with wealth. By the 1850s London had become established as the world’s wealthiest city yet by the 1890s a third of Londoners lived in poverty. 1 A ground-breaking piece of social scientific research undertaken by Charles Booth (1886–1903) and his team reported appalling narratives of poverty that would change attitudes towards the causes and cures of want forever. Reformers and charities worked tirelessly to help the poor, including a novel experiment initiated under a university-community partnership to design new forms of human settlement aimed at tackling the social issues and problems of the urban environment. The Settlement project made provision for the sustenance and shelter of the poor, including some modest occupation whereby they could be gainfully occupied until they got back on their feet (Toynbee Hall 1884, Hull House 1889). It represented a progressive alternative to the infrastructure of support for the deserving poor provided under the government’s Poor Law institutions and casework strategies.
