The Peckham Experiment

The experiment took place between 1926 and 1950, initially generated by rising public concern over the health of the working class and an increasing interest in preventive social medicine.

George Scott Williamson (1884–1953) and Innes Hope Pearse (1889–1978), two doctors who later married, opened the Pioneer Health Centre in a house in Queen's Road SE5 in 1926, choosing Peckham, in south east London, because "this populace roughly represents a cross-section of the total populace of the nation with as widely differing a cultural admixture as it is possible to find in any circumscribed metropolitan area" –.

This re-opened in 1935 in a purpose-built modern building in St Mary's Road, often quoted as an early example of how new architectural techniques could help further bold new social experiments.

By paying a nominal membership fee of one shilling (equivalent to £4 in 2023) a week,[4] a family had access to a range of activities such as physical exercise, swimming, games and workshops.

Central to Scott Williamson's philosophy was the belief that left to themselves people would spontaneously begin to organise in a creative way, and this happened, the members initiating a wide range of sporting, social and cultural activities using the facilities offered by the centre.

[5] In 1950, however, it finally closed, since its innovative approach did not fit well with the new National Health Service, and it proved impossible to obtain adequate funding from other sources to keep it going as an independent concern.

The surviving archives of the Pioneer Health Centre, which include personal papers of Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse, as well as material on subsequent attempts to recreate the experiment elsewhere, are now in the Wellcome Library.