Stanton George Coit (11 August 1857 – 15 February 1944)[1] was an American-born leader of the Ethical movement in England.

In 1886, he founded the Neighborhood Guild, a settlement house in New York City's Lower East Side which is now known as the University Settlement House, following three months spent at Toynbee Hall, which gave him the idea.

In 1898, Coit married Fanny Adela Wetzlar, daughter of a German industrialist Fritz von Gans,[4] who predeceased him in 1932.

They had three daughters[5] (Adela, Gwendolen and Virginia, his wife had three children from her previous marriage: Richard, Margaret and Elizabeth,).

In 1906 and 1910, he unsuccessfully stood for Parliament as the Independent Labour Party candidate in Wakefield.

[7] In 1908, he was sentenced to one month's imprisonment[8] for the indecent assault of a male bus conductor in Kensington which was later quashed on appeal.

But the effectiveness of this approach, while arguably successfully deployed for the late Victorian age, proved less suited to a more confident and outspoken generation of atheists and agnostics in the first half of the 20th century.

Many years later, what had been Coit's Ethical Church was sold again to director Richard Curtis and became famous as the blue door seen in the film Notting Hill.