[1] Ada Brown was active in the Methodist church and on the radical wing of the Liberal Party before she moved to London.

There she met Alfred Salter, agnostic and socialist, a resident engaged in medical research into infectious diseases on a farm in Sudbury (now Wembley), Middlesex.

Alfred, who was such a brilliant doctor he could have made a fortune as a consultant, therefore set up a GP's medical practice in Jamaica Road.

Ada continued as a social worker at Bermondsey Settlement, where she already had a high reputation for the clubs she ran, especially those for the "roughest and toughest" of teenage girls.

However, in 1910, personal tragedy struck when the Salters' only child, Joyce, then eight years old, died of scarlet fever in one of the periodic epidemics that swept through the slums, having been infected twice before.

To expedite demolition, she and her WLL comrades called for a Green Belt around London, to absorb the excess population from the slums.

Ada followed John Ruskin in believing that fresh air and contact with nature improved people not only physically but mentally and morally.

[4] Ada was hailed by the ILP and the WLL as the inspiration of this big step forward for women's rights at work (though she was only one factor) and for this, as well as for the huge organisational effort including what we would now consider as family food banks during the dockers' strike of 1912 (see Ben Tillett), she was honoured by the trade unions which are known today as Unite and the GMB.

Ada spoke out for equality among workers, not just in the workplace but in the labour movement:“When the trades union movement fully realises that all the workers, men and women, youth and maidens, were members one of another, then they will hear more than the rumble of revolution in the distance, the revolution will be here.”[1]Ada had always since her youth opposed war and becoming a Quaker had fortified her commitment to peace.

She was a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and from 1916 she also worked with Alfred for the No Conscription Fellowship.

Ada refused all the trappings of mayoral insignia or robes, and replaced the Union Jack with a red flag with symbols of Bermondsey, St Olave and Rotherhithe on the town hall.

[5] Finally, after the 1934 London County Council election, when Labour led by Herbert Morrison took control, Ada was able to spread her green socialist ideals to every corner of the capital.

She died, cared for by her sisters, in Balham Park Road, Battersea, on 4 December 1942 and was accorded a Quaker funeral at Peckham Meeting-House, where she was an elder.

As for valuing others, she believed this depended not only on individual effort but also entailed the emancipation of women and workers, who ought to be natural allies against oppression.

"[6] A beautiful garden, overlooking a lake, designed and supervised by Ada herself, was opened in 1936 within Southwark Park, in the Old Surrey Docks area.

[9] A set of statues was commissioned in 1991, depicting Dr Salter sitting on a bench facing the Thames, little Joyce standing by the river, with a cat perched on the wall.

In January 2023, English Heritage announced that a blue plaque would be unveiled later that year in Southwark which Salter had lived in during the late 1890s.