Becoming Neighbours: Stories of the Pembroke House Residency
Pembroke House is a community organisation based in Walworth, South London, founded in 1885 as one of the world's first settlement houses. A core principle of the settlement movement was residency: the idea that by actually living alongside disadvantaged communities, people could build genuine relationships across class and background, and work together toward meaningful change. For 140 years, successive groups of residential volunteers have come to live at Pembroke House, sharing their skills and time with the local community while being changed by the experience themselves. Pembroke House is believed to be the only settlement house in the UK still upholding this tradition.
It gave me a sense of how privileged I had been in the world up to that point — the circumstances in which people are born and live, and the impact that those circumstances have on their life, on other people's expectations of their lives, and what that means in terms of their ambitions and what they go on to achieve.
I think I assumed that you did well in life if you studied hard and worked hard. But actually, for some people, they could go through life and work incredibly hard, and still there's no expectation of being able to move away from the circumstances in which they're brought up. Alexandra, resident 1996-1997
Becoming Neighbours is an oral history project that set out to preserve and celebrate this legacy for the first time. Carried out during Pembroke House's 140th anniversary year, the project gathered 28 oral history interviews with former residential volunteers spanning six decades. Together, these voices tell the story of what it meant to move into a neighbourhood, connect to it, and actively seek to contribute to it.
I think being critical and being almost political was part of that experience of what it meant to be a resident. Trying to see how the way you live relates to the way others live, what that means, and whether it's good, whether it's bad. What your role, your responsibility is in just living a life in London. Emily, resident 2021-2022
The archive brings together interview recordings from people who lived in the Pembroke House Residency between the 1960s and the 2020s. Their stories range from the quietly transformative to the unexpectedly funny, from reflections on community and belonging to honest questions about who the Residency has served and what it should become in the future.
Becoming Neighbours was made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to uncover and archive stories from our Residency, preserving Walworth’s social history and offer lessons for new models of community-led living.
